Why is it always Lex Luthor?
With the premiere of James Gunn’s Superman, there are now nine films featuring Kal-El of Krypton, and all but three of them (two if you consider Superman III’s Ross Webster to be a Luthor stand-in, which he effectively is) feature Lex Luthor as the primary antagonist. Comic book movie enthusiasts may find this track record disappointing. The new Superman is a chance to really up the spectacle, to dream up the biggest physical feats imaginable. So why does the franchise keep pitting the Man of Steel against Just Some Ordinary Guy?
Superman doesn’t directly answer this question, but it does attempt to have it both ways: It has a buffet of spectacular threats that push Superman to the limit (the movie begins with the hero wheezing in the tundra after suffering his first defeat), but Lex Luthor is also the film’s undisputed villain, the puppet master behind everything. And while another version of this movie could’ve had Luthor recede to the background in order to give the film’s more superpowered threats the spotlight, Gunn ultimately decided not to bother with that, probably for one compelling reason: You can’t have a good Superman without a great Lex Luthor.
In interviews, Nicholas Hoult, who plays the villain, has talked about the ways this new version of Luthor is both of the moment and rooted in a very primal hatred of Superman that is inextricable from the character. “He imagined himself as a humanist and protector of humanity, and he wants to be idolized and adored for that,” Hoult told Collider. “So, someone else showing up who’s just naturally more gifted and able to do that—and taking all the limelight—is something that definitely irks him.”
Portrayals of Lex Luthor are frequently some combination of standard comic book villainy and a blunt caricature of the rich and greedy. At the dawn of the Atomic Age, this meant a Luthor who was a mad scientist; in the ’80s, writer and artist John Byrne imagined him as a white-collar criminal, taking direct inspiration from Donald Trump. Smallville’s Lex Luthor was incel-coded before such a term entered common parlance, a man whose feelings of loneliness and inadequacy curdled into jealousy and world-threatening misanthropy. When imagining Luthor as the mastermind behind Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zack Snyder had Jesse Eisenberg become a dark reflection of the Mark Zuckerberg he portrayed in The Social Network, a childish wunderkind who believes Superman is his problem to solve, with little concern about the wanton destruction he causes in attempting to solve it.
Superman is not a static character, but it’s through Lex Luthor that a Superman story most often grapples with the challenges of the present. It would be reductive to say Hoult’s very 2025 take on Luthor is a direct analogue of Elon Musk, the real world’s preeminent tech baron. Luthor’s more an amalgam of the world's richest men and their ambitions, a reflection of what it means to have the sort of unfettered power that a human can achieve short of the ability to fly and shrug off bullets. He’s not just wealthy; he’s also invested in a culture war that keeps the conversation on him as a concerned citizen and not as someone with an enormous stake in the outcome of global events.
In 2025, these types of men aren’t just mind-bogglingly rich. They’re rich and public. They’re heavily invested in directly shaping the world and making sure we know that their fingerprints are on it. Musk, Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the top three names on the Forbes 2025 “World’s Billionaires List”—are extraordinarily concerned with manipulating how we see the world. Each has built or bought influential media operations that have irrevocably altered our perception of ourselves and each other. And again: They want to be seen doing it, happily giving interviews, casually asserting that what serves their interests also serves the planet.
This is the mold that Hoult’s Luthor fills in Gunn’s Superman. This Luthor is one who goes on cable news to call Superman a would-be despot, an alien convincing Earth to love him so he can then subjugate it. A running gag about mean tweets and hashtags is revealed to be the work of an army of hyperintelligent monkeys Luthor has wired up to computers 24/7, and he presents himself to the United States government as the solution to the problems that he is creating. Despite how of the moment this Luthor feels, what’s truly deft about this interpretation is that he is also a composite of the character’s long, zany history as a stereotypical comic book villain.
In the character’s first appearance, 1940’s Action Comics #23, Luthor (no first name yet but a full head of hair), from the safety of a dirigible, engineers a conflict between the fictional Galonia and Toran, with his stated goal being “to send the nations of the Earth at each other’s throats, so that when they are sufficiently weakened, I can step in and assume charge!” In Superman, Luthor is equally invested in a war abroad, with the goal of getting a slice of the contested territory all to himself. (There are shades of Gene Hackman's Luthor and his evil plot in the ’78 Superman here.) Another dastardly deed of Hoult’s Luthor, the creation of his own personal Superman via a clone he dubs Ultraman, nods to the creation of Nuclear Man in Superman IV, and the origin of Bizarro Superman in John Byrne’s seminal 1986 comics reinvention, The Man of Steel.
Taken in whole, Gunn’s Superman strongly asserts, as Alison Willmore notes in her review of the film, that real-life villainy has crossed a Rubicon into the absurd, and any refusal to plainly describe what’s in this Superman story, what’s in every Superman story, just underlines the movie’s point all over again.
Richard Donner’s Superman was famously sold with the ad copy “You’ll believe a man can fly.” That version of Lex Luthor saw this as an inconvenience, a Superman whose remarkable abilities meant that he could easily foil his careful plans. In Gunn’s Superman, Hoult’s Lex, in his sky fortress, rails against Superman as an alien who took what he sees as his, undermining his incredible strides in human achievement and the acclaim he believes would otherwise go to him. He looks at the hero in flight and seethes with rage, too small to realize that he is also in the clouds, and that he could have taken us all with him.
