James Gunn's Superman Utterly Fails One Classic Character From The 1978 Movie

This article contains spoilers for "Superman."

James Gunn's "Superman" is a love letter to many previous incarnations of the character, with a lot of influence being pulled from different eras of the comics. But it also takes a lot of cues from the original 1978 Richard Donner "Superman" film — a movie that Gunn has said on multiple occasions had a massive impact on him as a kid. You can see that influence on things like David Corenswet's Superman valuing all life (even saving small animals in the middle of fights), the campy nature of some of the story and dialogue, and the back-and-forth between Clark Kent and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). Unfortunately, Gunn's film also does one character from the '78 film incredibly dirty.

Yes, I'm talking about Eve Teschmacher, Lex Luthor's ditzy girlfriend played by Sara Sampaio in the 2025 film. Eve isn't from the comics. Rather, she was created specifically for the 1978 movie, not entirely unlike how Harley Quinn was created for "Batman: The Animated Series." In Donner's film, the role was played by Valerie Perrine, and if you didn't know, let me be the first to tell you: She's an incredible character. While clearly playing into the "dumb bimbo" archetype, she stands up to Lex constantly, saves the day by saving Superman (and, uh, kissing him non-consensually, but more on that later), and is shown to be immensely capable.

The version we get in Gunn's film somehow feels more backward than the one we got 47 years ago. It's an insult to a great character, and quite frankly, it's one of the weakest parts of the new "Superman."

To talk about Eve Teschmacher, we have to talk about the bimbo as a cultural idea. Much has been written over the last five years about the feminist reclamation of the word, which, through image-forward social media platforms like TikTok in particular, has put forward a new, progressive definition that matches hyper-feminity with intelligence, liberation, and empowerment. As Laura Pitcher wrote for The Cut in 2021, "Self-confessed bimbos are discussing the flaws of late-stage capitalism while wearing fake eyelashes and winged eyeliner and posting captions that educate followers about gender and racial inequality with long acrylic nails."

Eve might not fit all of those qualifiers, but she'd thrive under the modern banner. Not all of her writing holds up, I'll grant you, but her contributions — both to Lex's evil plan and Superman's heroic one — are never played as accidents. She is fully aware of the kind of man Lex is, and she never misses an opportunity to put him in his place. ("When I was six years old, my father said to me..." Lex begins one boring diatribe. "'Get out?'" Eve suggests, cutting him off.)

The dolts of the film's U.S. military are quickly distracted by Eve's performative bimbo-hood, and when the incompetent Otis (Ned Beatty) messes up one of Luthor's schemes, it's Eve who sneaks back in and makes it work. The sexual harassment of Superman? Not a fan, obviously. But it was 1978. We have to allow at least some space for growth.

Given the history of her character and the modern trappings of more progressive writing around the archetype, Eve should have been a great addition to James Gunn's "Superman." Instead, she's played for a repeated joke that doesn't even make any sense. Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) has some sort of romantic history with her, which allows for convenient plot things to happen but is never explained to any degree. How did they meet? Why is she obsessed with him? Why does he find her so unbelievably grotesque that simply meeting with her at all is to be avoided at all costs?

Her worst offense throughout the entire movie is being kind of annoying — a trait that you'd expect to be played for unearned laughs in, say, 1978, but now? Even when she saves the day with a barrage of selfies featuring classified LuthorCorp intel in the background, she never really gets the proper credit for helping thwart the villain's plans. She doesn't get any real agency — we just hear jokes about how much everyone apparently hates her (and her "mutant toes") for the fifth time. It's a character written by your sexist uncle's Facebook posts — a sort of empty treatise of "selfies and makeup are dumb" with no twist.

Lazy doesn't begin to describe it. This is a waste of a character who could have been fantastic in 2025. Sampaio does her best with the material, but the script does her no favors, and Eve winds up being both the film's least sensical plot device and most embarrassing joke. In the Year of our Lord 2025, Eve Teschmacher deserved so much better.