Once Superman, always Superman.
For a generation of kids too young to catch Christopher Reeve’s Superman run in the ’80s, ABC’s Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman served as their introduction to the invincible titan. That means Dean Cain was many people’s first exposure to a live-action Superman—and he’s not too happy with James Gunn’s recent comments about the hero being an immigrant.
Gunn recently told The Sunday Times that Superman’s story reflects the American experience, saying the son of Krypton is “an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.” Well, that got Cain’s retired red trunks in a bunch. In a video interview with TMZ, Cain didn’t hold back his criticism, claiming that labeling the hero an immigrant will prove to be a misstep.
“I think that was a mistake by James Gunn to say it’s an immigrant thing, and I think it’s going to hurt the numbers on the movie. I was excited for the film. I am excited to see what it is… I’m rooting for it to be a success, but I don’t like that last political comment.”
Here’s Cain’s issue: he’s tired of Disney and Hollywood retrofitting legacy characters like Superman and Snow White with modern ideologies that, in his view, align with current political trends but strip those characters of their original, innocent essence. Put simply, he’s tired of his favorite characters becoming—wait for it—“woke.”
To Cain, Superman has always stood for “truth, justice, and the American way,” but only the American way of decades past—not the modern one, which he suggests is compromised by too much immigration.
“You can’t come in saying, ‘I want to get rid of all the rules in America because I want it to be more like Somalia.’ Well, that doesn’t work, because you had to leave Somalia to come here…There have to be limits, because we can’t have everybody in the United States. We can’t have everybody—society will fail. So there have to be limits.”
But Cain seems to be ignoring a few key facts. First, Superman is literally an alien, and U.S. immigration law considers anyone who isn’t a citizen or national of the United States an “alien.” In fact, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has an entire section dedicated to Alien Registration Requirements.
Secondly, Smallville had an entire episode in which Clark Kent (Tom Welling) confronts his mother about her hypocritical stance—wanting to report an undocumented immigrant to authorities but not doing the same when Clark crash-landed on their farm. To leave nothing open to interpretation, Clark explicitly says, “I’m an illegal immigrant, Mom.”
At the end of the day, no matter how beloved a character may be, their identity is at the discretion of whoever owns their copyright. If one day Kevin Feige decides Iron Man should be a priest, or Thor an Indian bus driver, or Doctor Doom a pediatrician, then that’s what they’ll be.
To rephrase what Jay-Z once said: If you want old Superman, watch old Superman movies.
