The Superman 2025 script opens on the first defeat of the hero’s career and never shows the fight he lost. Six lines of text count down from three centuries to three minutes, and then a body falls into the snow (script p. 1). James Gunn spends his first page establishing that the most powerful metahuman on Earth is bleeding and that his dog is useless, and his second page that the robots who carry him inside have, in their own words, no consciousness whatsoever (p. 2). Everything the film argues about being human starts from that floor.

What this reading uses

The film is read here against Gunn’s 132-page release screenplay, the finished picture, and his own director’s commentary, which is the closest thing to a draft history this script has: the pages match the release cut, so the scenes Gunn describes cutting live only in his account. Page numbers point at the script; minute markers point at the film. The two disagree in a few places worth knowing about, starting with the setting of page 1, which the script calls Antarctica and which Gunn shot in Svalbard, in the Arctic.

The number that runs the film

The script gives Superman a health readout on page 5 and lets it stand for the whole story. He leaves the Fortress at eighty-three percent restored, over the robots’ objection, because the city needs him now. The script never gives a second number. His body is repaired again, twice, by yellow sun (pp. 98, 130) after Kryptonite nearly kills him (p. 91), and none of those repairs gets a readout. What the film measures on screen is the other recovery: a sentence on a porch and a choice in front of Lex Luthor, I’m as human as anyone (p. 126). The body heals offstage; the man is restored in dialogue, and that is the writing lesson underneath the spectacle.

Act one

Opening on defeat

The crash: stakes without a backstory

The six lines of countdown text do the work of an origin story in under a minute of screen time: metahumans three centuries ago, a baby from another world three decades ago, the name Superman three years ago, the Boravia intervention three weeks ago, the Hammer of Boravia three hours ago, and three minutes ago, a battle lost for the first time (p. 1). Gunn told the commentary he wanted the opening to carry the history of his whole universe; the script does it in a form a reader can absorb in one glance. Then the speck falls.

The dog is the second decision. Krypto arrives at super-speed and pounces on a man who may be dying, and the script stops to tell the reader, in Gunn’s own voice on the page, that this is a terrible dog with no respect for boundaries (p. 1). That aside reads as tone instruction written into the action line: the film will play brutality and comedy in the same frame, and it will not apologize for either. Gunn has said Krypto is his own rescue dog, Ozu, and that the dog’s worst behavior was filmed as reference.

The ticking recovery: sterile robots, unruly duty

Inside the Fortress the robots inventory the damage, fourteen fractured bones among it, and lay him under concentrated sunlight (5m). Robot Four disclaims any consciousness on the way in (p. 2) and then, on page 5, tries to keep him in bed: eighty-three percent restored, you must rest. He goes anyway. The exchange solves the invincibility problem in one line. A hero who cannot be hurt is inert; a hero who leaves at eighty-three percent has made a choice the audience can weigh.

The robots are the sterile half of a pair. Krypto is the unruly half. The script keeps cutting between machine logic and animal chaos in the same room, and the effect is to make the man in the middle feel like the only one making decisions. That is the mechanism the rest of the film runs on.

Lex’s assault on the story

The second fight with the Hammer of Boravia (8m to 12m) is the first Lex Luthor scene, and it is a scene about information. Lex calls moves from a control room, the Hammer executes them, and the fight is lost or won on who knows the other man better. When the mask comes off it is Ultraman, and the script holds his identity back for most of the film. Lex’s real weapon is not the clone. It is the damaged message from Krypton, which he will finish decoding and broadcast at 41 minutes as an instruction to conquer. The villain does not try to kill Superman first. He rewrites who Superman is, and lets the world do the rest.

Themes

Legacy, the porch, and kindness as a choice

Weaponized legacy: the midpoint nightmare

The Fortress hologram is introduced as comfort. Robot Four plays the fragment of Jor-El and Lara to soothe him (4m), and the script is explicit that the rest of the message was lost in transit. When Lex restores the missing half and broadcasts it at 40 minutes (script p. 48), the parents’ farewell becomes a colonial instruction: lord over the planet, take wives, rule without mercy. Clark does not argue with it. Within ten minutes he is discussing turning himself in (50m), and by 53 minutes he is in Lex’s pocket universe.

The structural move is to convert backstory into an active antagonist. Most superhero scripts treat heritage as a reservoir the hero draws on in the third act. Gunn makes it the thing that breaks him at the midpoint, so that identity, not survival, is the question the second half has to answer. The corrupted mentor is doing the villain’s work from inside the hero’s own head.

Porch wisdom: choices over fate

The answer arrives on the Kent porch (85m to 87m; script pp. 99-100). Clark, a bowl of oatmeal on his lap, tells his father he is not who he thought he was. Pa’s reply is the script’s thesis in plain speech: parents are not for telling children who they are supposed to be, they hand out tools and let you make a fool of yourself on your own, and then the line the film is built to deliver, your choices, your actions, that is what makes you who you are (p. 100). He cannot get through the next sentence. Ma calls him an old mush.

Gunn says on the commentary that this was among the hardest scenes to shoot because so much of the film rests on it, and that he wanted a real Kansas farmer in the part rather than an aging movie star, an actor who would bring groundedness and kindness. On the page the scene is almost entirely dialogue and two stage directions about weeping. It resolves the midpoint crisis without a single superpower, which is the point: the message from the stars was a claim about nature, and the porch answers it with a claim about conduct.

Kindness as deliberate power

The line audiences quote most is Clark’s, from the apartment scene at 49 minutes (script p. 58). Lois has just told him she questions everyone and he trusts everyone and finds them beautiful; his answer is that maybe that is the real punk rock. Gunn calls it one of the lines most often repeated back to him, and says the internet rewrote it as “kindness is the real punk rock” on shirts and memes; the word kindness is not on the page. On the commentary he frames it as a reaction against a decade of gritty, murdering superheroes he also enjoys: a suspicion that edginess is fearful media, running from what people are like in their raw state.

The script earns the slogan by making kindness cost something every time. The Metropolis kaiju is a creature Superman wants to relocate rather than kill while the Justice Gang wants it dead (35m to 38m). The squirrel he saves during the fight is a running joke with a serious spine. And the final confrontation with Lex is not won with a punch. It is won with a paragraph about screwing up and trying again (p. 126). Deliberate, repeated, expensive choice is what turns a value into a character.

Primary source

What Gunn says he cut, and why

The screenplay circulating for this film is a clean release script; it contains none of the material Gunn describes removing. His commentary is therefore the draft history, and four cuts in it are worth a writer’s attention because each one is a tonal calibration rather than a plot change.

The dog punch

In early cuts, when Krypto is taken down by the nanites at the Fortress (29m), Lex gave Ultraman a nod and Ultraman punched the dog unconscious. Gunn says the audience jumped, that it read as if Krypto had died, and that people hated Lex even more than they do now. He cut it anyway: the reaction was too large for that point in the film. The lesson is about proportion. A villain can be made hateful too early, and the hate spends itself before the scene that needs it.

The blood on the platform

Mali’s murder at 64 minutes (script p. 78) was shot with a longer aftermath: blood pooling toward Lex’s shoes, and Ghurkos, the president of Boravia, ordered to lie down and soak it up so it would not reach them. Gunn says he cut it very early and is glad he did, while admitting he liked what it said about where power sits between corporations and countries. The script keeps the shot in an ultra-wide, the body falling, and nothing after. Sometimes the strongest version of a scene is the one that ends first.

The petri dish and the arm

Two smaller cuts round out the picture. A line in which Lex explains that Mr. Handsome, the platform driver and a character original to the film, was something he grew in a petri dish at twelve went out because it explained more than the scene could carry. And after the finale, a gag in which Lex tries to stand on a broken arm and it bends the wrong way went out before Gunn ever screened the film to anyone; it played as one beat of cruelty too many. Read together, every cut moves in the same direction: less explanation, less viciousness, the same stakes.

Cast of functions

Character breakdown: lessons for screenwriters

Each figure below is doing one structural job. The table names the arc as the script plays it and the transferable technique.

Plot and production

Plot and production insights from Superman 2025

Spoiler-aware plot snapshot

A defeat by the Hammer of Boravia sends Superman to the Fortress and back to Metropolis at 83 percent (1m to 7m). A second fight reveals Ultraman (12m). Lois interviews him as a reporter and the interview becomes an argument about Boravia and Jarhanpur (20m). The kaiju fight introduces the Justice Gang (35m). Lex broadcasts the restored Kryptonian message (40m); Clark surrenders and is held in a pocket universe (53m), where Lex murders Mali (64m). Mr. Terrific and Lois break him out through a black hole (68m to 77m); Kryptonite poisoning and a morning of sun follow (pp. 91-98). The porch (85m to 87m). Lex’s rift tears at Metropolis (89m), the Daily Planet publishes (92m), the Ultraman fight (98m), the speech to Lex (111m), and Kara Zor-El collects her dog (118m).

What stays on the page

Three writing decisions carry from script to screen without loss. The exposition is delivered by characters who do not care about it: the robots explain the message because it is their job, and the script tells us they have no feelings about doing so (p. 2). The percentage on page 5 replaces a whole recovery montage. And the interview scene at 20 minutes (script pp. 25-34, with the ethics argument on p. 24) lets Lois say out loud that Clark interviewing himself is a problem, so that the film’s political argument is staged as a couple’s quarrel rather than a lecture.

What changed between page and screen, per Gunn’s commentary, is almost entirely subtraction: the four cuts above, and more of Steve Lombard in tears during the rooftop scene, which he hopes will surface as a deleted scene. The script that circulates is the film. The commentary is the draft.

Structure, minute by minute

The Superman 2025 beat sheet, retimed

Minute markers are timed to the film; page numbers to the release script. The four acts below use the film’s own beats rather than a borrowed template, and several times differ from earlier versions of this breakdown: the interview lands at 20 minutes, the broadcast at 40, Mali’s death at 64, and the porch at 85.

Act I: The broken beacon (min 1-13)

The first act is a recovery, not an origin. Text stands in for backstory, the Fortress stands in for a montage, and the act ends when the hero goes back out at less than full strength and learns that the man who beat him is being coached.

Act IIa: Kindness is the real punk rock (min 13-41)

The promise of the premise is a Superman who is argued with. Lois tests his ethics before his feelings, the Justice Gang tests his methods, and the act closes on the message that tests his nature.

Act IIb: The pocket universe (min 41-87)

The descent is a loss of story rather than of power. He surrenders, is imprisoned, watches a man die for him, escapes, and is put back together on a porch.

Act III: Chosen triumph (min 87-129)

The third act pays off the gauge. The city is saved by a team, the story is broken by a newspaper, and the villain is beaten by a paragraph.

Superman 2025 ending explained

Superman 2025 ending explained: choice over destiny

The ending inverts the opening. A man face-down in snow becomes a man floating over a saved city, and the message that was supposed to define him is answered rather than obeyed. Lex, beaten, calls him an alien (p. 126). The reply is the film’s argument in first person: he is as human as anyone, he loves, he gets scared, he puts one foot in front of the other and makes the best choices he can, he screws up all the time, and that is being human, and that is his real strength. The film’s subtitle track has him say “that is being human” rather than the script’s contraction; the sense is identical.

Why the speech lands

The speech works because it is the third statement of the same idea and the first one Clark makes himself. Pa said it on the porch (p. 100). Lois half-said it in the apartment when he called trusting everyone the real punk rock (p. 58). Here, in front of the man who rewrote his story, Clark says it as a claim about his own nature, and the gauge fills. The Daily Planet exposure restores his public standing; the speech restores the rest. Kara’s arrival (118m) is a franchise beat, but the true final image is the Kent home video: Pa holding a baby over his head, flying him (p. 132). The last shot of a film about a man from another planet is his human father teaching him how.

The lesson

Audacious closures survive when they resolve a character’s question rather than the plot’s. The question here was set on page 1 and asked out loud on the porch: who decides what you are? The ending answers it with conduct, and the conduct has been on screen since he walked out of the Fortress at eighty-three percent, the last number the script gives him.

For writers

Why Superman 2025 still matters for screenwriters

The big idea

Gunn humanizes an icon by denying him completion. The health readout is the device, and the script is careful never to write a second number: a near-omnipotent character becomes dramatic the moment the script establishes something he cannot fix by force, and this script establishes three in its first act (a lost fight, a damaged message, a dog that will not obey). Lex then attacks the one thing strength cannot defend, the story of who Superman is. Gunn told CBS the film is about the man rather than the super, and the structure bears that out: every turn of the plot is a turn in Clark’s account of himself.

Practical applications

Open after the failure and let text do the origin. Give the hero a number that stands for his condition and then stop updating it, so the audience keeps score. Turn heritage into an antagonist by letting the villain finish the hero’s backstory for him. Put the theme in the mouth of the least powerful person on screen, and let it cost him something to say. Stage the political argument as a couple’s quarrel. And when the climax arrives, have the hero win with the thing the villain said he lacked. The Superman 2025 script does each of these on a page you can cite.

Reader questions

Superman 2025 script: questions readers ask

The script and the quote

The opening and the ending