Released a little over 4 months after James Gunn’s Superman hit cinemas and kicked off the theatrical arm of the DCU, Superman: The Art and Making of the Film is James Field’s celebration of the entire filmmaking process. As Christmas approaches, I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the new coffee table book, and can happily report it’s easily recommendable to fans of the film.
All any companion book needs to aspire to is adding to the experience of watching the release it celebrates: pleasantly, Superman: The Art and Making of The Film achieves precisely that. It’s also worth noting that the RRP is $50, which is uncharacteristically affordable for coffee table books like this – for instance, the Thunderbolts* equivalent released earlier this year was set at $100 initially. Others have started even higher, which always made them feel rather less accessible.
Because Superman is the first DCU movie, the book kicks off – after an introduction by James Gunn and a foreword by the eloquent David Corenswet – with some insight into the formation of the franchise. That story will surely be told in greater detail further down the road, and it’s understandably surface-level, but it makes the book a little more than “just” a release about Superman. The rest of the book is a detailed journey through the production, from conception to casting and through to filming, which amplifies a lot more creative voices than Gunn, who might not otherwise get the chance to shine. There are intriguing explanations of costume details and designs, aesthetic influences for sets, and worldbuilding tidbits that are invaluable if you care either about this universe or about how the process of creation comes together. Given the rising tide of AI from the sewers below us, this feels a particularly pertinent value to this book, and all others like it.
There’s also, of course, loving focus given to the art behind what we saw on screen, from concept designs through to alternate character designs (the most significant probably for the kaiju and the fifth-dimensional imp that both attack Metropolis). Alongside those, the voices of the artists who created the costumes and Gunn’s Metropolis – and how the film-maker was involved in those processes – offer interesting further insight. That means this is more than just a visual compendium, which some coffee table books can become.
My one reservation for Superman: The Art and Making of The Film is that while it does include some concept art, there’s not as much as you might expect. It would have been nice to see some of the early development art for the major characters, but that perhaps comes from my own insatiable curiosity for the experience of film development. And James Gunn’s charitable approach to social media and post-release marketing also meant that quite a lot of the juicy details in the book won’t come as a surprise to lots of people. That said, what’s in there does offer a good look into the process, though for those who weren’t chained to the flow of information. And I did learn some things from the book I didn’t already know.
