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.
When Superman hits theaters this week, it opens with six sentences that set up not just the world of the DC Universe, but Superman’s origin and the film’s plot, all in mere seconds. It’s something George Lucas also did for a little film called Star Wars, and Gunn decided to add that to his film. “I didn’t have that in the movie originally,” Gunn said of his version of the crawl. “[And it was] definitely inspired by Star Wars. You think about Star Wars and it’s like, ‘Yeah, there’s all this crazy stuff happening, but you have that scroll in the beginning,’ and it didn’t really bother me as a kid. I like the scroll. So it’s just kind of setting the tone for what this universe is so that people feel a little bit more settled.”
Once he did it, Gunn also realized the crawl served a similar function to something else in another one of his famous movies. “It’s almost like in Guardians [of the Galaxy] allowing that music to come in because everything was so outlandish,” he said. “But by feeling that ’70s AM pop, it gave people some grounding. So I’m always really cognizant of allowing the big, brash, weird, crazy stuff to happen, but also always giving people their feedback. And you do that through emotion. You do that through subtle storytelling. And you do it through music. That was the movie.”
As much as I enjoyed Superman, that opening crawl might be my favorite part of the entire movie. We won’t ruin it just yet, but it sets the tone in such an exciting way that it sends the film off like a rocket ship. Check it out when Superman hits theaters July 11.