Even as internet sharks circle the (surprisingly expensive) news that HBO Max will be playing host to a re-cut version of Zack Snyder’s Justice League next year, the members of the League itself remain doggedly difficult to track down. Batman’s just gone, of course, with Ben Affleck having flown the belfry shortly after the film’s release back in 2017. But even the more technically-extant members of the superhero squad are being a little aloof these days, what with The Flash having been “in development” for roughly a decade, Cyborg going AWOL, and Wonder Woman aggressively doing her own thing. As Warner Bros. has attempted to salvage the only-moderately-profitable situation by scaling down plans, focusing on individual characters, and pulling back from the shared universe stuff, chaos has inevitably reigned. Harley Quinn suddenly has more movies than Batman; Aquaman is a major box office draw; the Batmobile broke a wheel, and now there’s, like, six Jokers roving around out there.
Which raises the question: Whither Superman? We haven’t seen Henry Cavill’s take on DC Comics’ iconic good guy for three years now, ever since he and his suspiciously absent mustache saved the day from Steppenwolf. (Steppenwolf: Still the bad guy from Justice League!) Shazam! even ends with Superman showing up at Billy Batson’s school as a plot point, but Cavill himself never appears. (They used Zachary Levi’s stuntman for it, instead.) Heck, he didn’t even show up for The CW’s big Crisis crossover, and they even got Smallville’s Tom Welling for that one.
But the Man Of Steel’s (fortress of) solitude might be about to crumble. Deadline reports that Cavill is apparently in talks to reprise the role of Superman—although, hilariously, no one appears to know where. The article makes it fairly clear that Man Of Steel 2 is definitely not on the table, but doesn’t specify where else he might reasonably cameo. Shazam 2 and Black Adam, set for November 2022 and December 2021, respectively, might be a reasonable guess, but we’d like to pretend that Supes will be showing up for The Trench, that movie about the fish monsters from Aquaman that Warner Bros. once floated the idea of making. Wherever he pops up, it’ll presumably be somewhere where having, y’know, Superman on hand won’t immediately solve the problem. But they’ll also need it to be at least semi-substantial; you don’t want to force Cavill to shave again for nothing, right?