James Gunn's Darkest Deleted Superman Scene Would Have Gone Too Far

If you haven't heard yet, superhero movies are fun again. James Gunn has introduced us all to a new era of comic book movies with "Superman," a charming crowd-pleaser that's silly in all the right ways ... except when it's not. While Gunn clearly set out to make a Superman movie with a healthy dose of his off-kilter sense of humor and sentimentality that made the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies so successful, that doesn't mean he doesn't go dark when he feels he needs to.

For one thing, the movie starts with a bloodied Man of Steel groaning alone in the snow, having just been defeated for the first time in his life by a mysterious supervillain named the Hammer of Boravia. That's a pretty rough start for Supes, and while the film manages to keep things light-hearted in the moments after (helped massively by Krypto, who might just be the real star of "Superman"), Gunn also isn't above delving back into the darkness as things progress.

Easily the most upsetting moment in the whole movie (aside from Krypto being stolen by Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor) is when Lex kills Dinesh Thyagarajan's Malik, a Metropolis falafel vendor who previously gave Superman a free meal and came to his aid during his battle with the Hammer of Boravia. Malik's death is so jarring that it almost feels as if it belongs in another movie entirely, which is why it's sort of shocking to learn that Gunn initially shot an even darker version of this moment.

A good example of "Superman" going dark when it needs to is Lex Luthor's alternate dimension prison, in which he traps everyone who has ever wronged him in glass cubes, including Anthony Carrigan's Metamorpho and that character's infant son. It's here that Lex dispatches Malik with a gunshot to the head right in front of Superman himself, in a moment that's truly shocking (even though Gunn cuts to a wide shot to spare us the grizzly details of the moment itself).

But it seems the director and DC Studios co-head also spared us some extra moments from this scene which would have taken it from a downer to full-on disturbing. During his appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Gunn explained how the full scene played out in his original cut, revealing that after Lex shot Malik, he originally forced Boravian president Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Burić) to soak up the poor falafel vendor's blood. "[Lex shooting Malik in the head was] always done in this extreme wide so it's not too graphic," Gunn explained. "But the guy fell on the ground and blood is pouring out onto the platform and Lex looks down and he sees that the blood is about to get on his shoes and he's like, 'Oh my god, my shoes.'" Gunn then laid out what would have happened next: Lex ordered Ghurkos to "get down on the ground and soak up the blood," a request the Boravian president initially refuses. The director continued:

"And Nic [Hoult] looks at him. The delivery is great because he just looks at him straight and he's like, 'No?' And then Ghurkos just sheepishly, like, sadly trudges forward and lays down on his back, and he's so funny. He lays down on his back and then just starts [Gunn moves his torso left and right] and soaking up the blood and then Nick looks over at Superman and says 'I'll see you tomorrow.' And then they drive away."

As Gunn remembered it, that particularly grim moment never even made it into a test screening, because he could tell it was a step too far. That was almost certainly the right call. Gunn's "Superman" differs from past versions in important ways, most notably by making Supes a big ol' goof who isn't entirely sure what he's doing most of the time. While the film is punctuated with darker moments, focusing on the graphic details of Lex's shocking murder was unnecessary when the moment itself is already the most upsetting in the entire movie.