Superman Run Time Reported, Refuted, and Resulting From Last-Minute Edits

Movies

It turns out that when you’re faster than a speeding bullet, it’s hard to pin down how long you’ll stay on movie screens. Superman, the first film in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU, will arrive in theaters on July 11, 2025, with Gunn in the director’s chair and David Corenswet stepping into the red cape, backed up by Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. With the movie now relatively close, fans are looking for any details they can get, among them how long it will be. Yesterday, we thought we had an answer, as X account DC Film News stated Superman would be 122 minutes, based on reports from international distributors. However, when asked about the run time today, James Gunn denied the reports, saying the movie is not finished yet, although it’s close; according to Gunn, there are just some visual effects shots to complete this coming weekend. You can see both the mistaken run time announcement and Gunn’s correction below, captured from Threads by DC Film News:

James Gunn confirms ‘SUPERMAN’ runtime IS NOT 2H 2M.

“That’s not correct. It’s almost totally locked – meaning we’re just finishing a couple VFX shots over the weekend – but that’s not the running time.” pic.twitter.com/QNm1UKehNX

— DC Film News (@DCFilmNews) May 28, 2025

Oh, well. Gunn’s denial makes you wonder if this means the movie’s run time will be significantly different from the reported 122 minutes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is; there’s a lot of movie stuffed into this movie, with Superman meeting Green Lantern, Mr. Terrific, the Engineer, Hawkgirl, Supergirl, Metamorpho, and probably others as he fights other super-beings, a giant lizard, robots, some kind of sci-fi prison and its guards, and possibly tweeting space monkeys, with Lex Luthor behind it all. And Krypto; let us not forget Krypto (not that Gunn will let us). Unless a bunch of these characters are getting short-changed, it’s going to be hard to fit all of this into just over two hours – actually, just under two hours, as the run time includes the end credits, which will no doubt be long on an effects-heavy movie like Superman. Regardless, a run time isn’t important until people can see the film and judge for themselves if it’s too hot, too cold, or just right. However, this snafu led to a much more interesting story from Word of Reel, whose sources claim that the movie is being tinkered with and has been since those rumored underwhelming test screenings.

According to Word of Reel’s sources, Gunn and his fellow DC Studios CEO, Peter Safran, along with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, are working down to the wire to get this movie perfect, taking in criticisms from test screenings and changing Superman to make it as appealing as possible. And these are fairly big changes, ones that World of Reel says resulted in quietly firing one of the editors and changing the tone of the film, which apparently had too much humor for the test audiences and Warner Bros. executives. The change in tone also necessitated a new composer to be brought in to update the score a bit. Cutting many of the jokey scenes is leading to a shorter run time, so the report goes, and several big sequences have been “shuffled,” with added scenes filmed during reshoots. The new cut is said to have lost 25 minutes and is “leaner.” This is described by one of Word of Reel’s sources as a “slight course correction,” and a final round of test screenings is set to happen this week, with Word of Reel saying the movie is “officially in the can.”

I find Word of Reel’s report credible. The idea that Gunn was going to make Superman too jokey and infuse it with his usual broad humor was one of the concerns many fans had when he decided to write and direct the movie himself. Shoving in so many other heroes, the focus on Krypto the dog, and the off-target dialogue from the first full trailer all pointed to him making a James Gunn movie first and a Superman movie second, and bringing in comedy more fitting for a Guardians of the Galaxy film fits that bill. (I know a lot of people liked it, but I felt he did that with The Suicide Squad, too.) Apparently, he needed to be beaten over the head with the idea that people want this to feel like a Superman film. When I first saw that they’d brought in a new composer to alter the score, I immediately thought that they’d be using the John Williams theme in its full glory, as opposed to those guitar riffs of it in the trailer (which I hope are just a trailer thing), but l think it’s more likely that they need the score to be a bit more dramatic in certain places. As for the run time, I don’t know for sure, but I think the 122 minutes story might be true, and Gunn’s insistence that they’re still finishing it is cover for the new round of test screenings. If the movie is shorter now, I’d find it extremely difficult to believe they cut 25 minutes from a 122-minute film; there’s just no way it could be that short. But whatever gets a good result is fine with me; if this is all true, the changes following the test screenings could make Superman a better movie, and I’ll be pleased if that happens. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Superman.

Let us know what you think of Superman’s run time and altering the film’s tone in the comments!

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