During post-production on Superman, writer-director James Gunn ran into a problem. “We found that people loved the movie but that they were confused about the world they were entering,” Gunn told io9 recently. And so, to fix that problem, late in the filmmaking process, he looked to another one of his favorite films for the fix.

The filmmaker said the David Corenswet-led film also comes at a "particular time when people are feeling a loss of hope in other people’s goodness."