SupermanThe Man of Steel
The live action history divides cleanly into four attempts to define the character for a mass audience: the serials of the 1940s and 1950s, the Christopher Reeve films, the Zack Snyder films, and the 2025 relaunch.
Kirk Alyn played the character first, in the 1948 Columbia serial Superman and its 1950 sequel Atom Man vs. Superman. George Reeves took over for the 1951 feature Superman and the Mole Men and then for Adventures of Superman, the television series that ran until 1958 and made the character a fixture of American childhood.
Format: film serial and television series
Directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve, with Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Marlon Brando as Jor‑El. Its marketing promised audiences they would believe a man could fly, and its commercial success established that comic book adaptations could be treated as serious, expensive filmmaking rather than children's matinees.
Format: theatrical feature
Superman II in 1980 brought General Zod to Earth and is widely held to be the strongest sequel. Superman III in 1983 moved towards comedy with Richard Pryor, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in 1987, made on a sharply reduced budget, ended the series. Reeve played the role in all four films.
Format: theatrical features
Bryan Singer's film cast Brandon Routh and was written as a loose continuation of the Donner films rather than a restart, picking up after a five year absence. It performed reasonably but not well enough to launch the sequels that had been planned, and the series was put aside.
Format: theatrical feature
Zack Snyder's Man of Steel introduced Henry Cavill in a darker, heavily science fiction retelling of the origin, and started a shared universe. Cavill returned for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 and Justice League in 2017, with Snyder's own four hour cut released in 2021.
Format: theatrical features
Written and directed by James Gunn, with David Corenswet as Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. It skips the origin entirely, opening with a Superman who has been active for three years, and it is the first film of the rebuilt DC Universe. A sequel, Man of Tomorrow, is scheduled for 2027.
Format: theatrical feature
Running alongside the films, television kept its own continuity. Lois & Clark ran from 1993 to 1997 and Smallville from 2001 to 2011, followed by Superman & Lois with Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch, which reframed the character as a father raising two teenage sons.
Format: television seriesAnimation shaped the character as much as the comics did. Flight, the opening narration and several of the visual conventions still in use were established by the 1941 shorts before they ever reached print.
Seventeen theatrical shorts produced by Fleischer Studios and then Famous Studios between 1941 and 1943. They were among the most expensive cartoons ever made at that point, the first was nominated for an Academy Award, and their rotoscoped animation and art deco Metropolis are still copied. They are now in the public domain.
Format: theatrical shorts
The New Adventures of Superman, produced by Filmation from 1966, returned the character to Saturday morning television. From 1973 Super Friends placed him at the head of a Justice League line up for more than a decade, and for a generation of viewers that show, rather than the comics, was the primary version.
Format: television series
Produced by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini after Batman: The Animated Series and voiced by Tim Daly. It is generally regarded as the best balanced adaptation of the character, and it fed directly into Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, which ran until 2006 with George Newbern in the role.
Format: television series
DC's direct to video line adapted several major comics, including All‑Star Superman in 2011, The Death of Superman in 2018 and Superman: Red Son in 2020. The current television version is My Adventures with Superman, an anime influenced series that began in 2023 and follows Clark, Lois and Jimmy early in their careers.
Format: animated features and series