Saturation and Superman: The Refreshing Nostalgia of Hope Through Color

For years, superhero movies have bathed their heroes in desaturated palettes—navy blues instead of sky blues, bloody maroon instead of bright crimson, muted grays instead of shining silver. These choices were intentional statements, telling the audience: this is serious, this is grounded, this is for adults.

But in 2025, Superman stepped out of the shadows. For the first time in years, director James Gunn’s unabashedly bright rendition of Superman’s eponymous hero reminds us of the comic book characters that big-screen superheroes are supposed to represent.

Gunn’s Superman looks like he did on the comic page in 1938, as if he were ripped from the panels and dropped into the 21st century. Kal-El’s suit is red, blue, and yellow again, featuring the classically cartoonish outer underwear made of spandex rather than the “realistic” leather textures that have dominated the genre since the 2000s. To see why Gunn’s choice matters, it’s worth revisiting how we got here.

From the Dark Knight trilogy to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, 21st-century superhero blockbusters leaned heavily into muted palettes as if comic book brightness was a liability. This worked for dark characters and settings that have always haunted comic book pages. Movies like Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), for example, relied on shadows, smoke, steel beams, and earth tones to ground Gotham in something closer to crime noir than pulp adventure. The resulting scenery complemented Batman, a character who has historically thrived in darkness. But the aesthetic

stuck. Soon, studios applied the same template across the superhero genre, toning down vibrancy even when it authentically represented some characters’ source material.

By the time Zack Snyder helmed Man of Steel (2013), Superman had become the collateral damage of this desaturation trend. His classic primary colors were dulled into a near-monochrome suit. His cape was maroon, his blue was metallic navy, his chest-emblem yellow all but gone. Snyder’s vision of Superman wasn’t a bright symbol of hope but instead an alien burden or a godlike outsider; the color palette only reinforced that vision. We, as the audience, were no longer the common man looking up at Superman as the shining beacon of hope and inspiration. Instead, we were closer

to Lex Luthor, seeing the Man of Steel as a dark source of deep anxiety and a possible obstacle to the other heroes’ success, especially in Snyder’s other Superman and Justice League films.

Relative to other superheroes, dampening Superman’s colors particularly betrays the character’s roots. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938, America was still clawing its way out of the Great Depression. The world was drab, uncertain, and heavy with despair. Superman’s design was quite intentionally the opposite: a man in

radiant blue, with a golden emblem that caught the eye, and a red cape that fluttered like a flag. His costume colorfully represented promise for a gray and dreary world that was dragging through war and economic hardship.

As time passed, however, publishers upgraded Superman and other comic characters alike from the less-expensive newspaper comic prints to glossy, professional comic books that possessed a wealth of color palettes. And with added resources and consideration, authors also pushed narrative boundaries. Post-war storylines introduced complex, grim, novel themes that forced the readers to reexamine the values and fallacies of these extraordinary characters. While these darker plots are a useful and sometimes necessary way to introduce perspectives that readers might find more challenging, they often make us forget the hope these characters were originally intended to inspire.

Producers, perceiving these graver tones across comic books, often force muted aesthetics onto even the least “dark” superhero stories they bring to the big screen. Snyder’s Superman epitomized this—his suit, drained of vibrancy, suggested not

just a different interpretation of the character but a wholesale rejection of his origins. The filmmakers framed Superman through a lens of suspicion, fear, and moral ambiguity, but did not provide the audience with a story that encouraged them to look

beyond Superman’s alien origins. The palette did not simply change how Superman looked; it changed how we were meant to feel about him.

This is where Gunn’s Superman departs from recent superhero trends. His decision to reintroduce the saturated reds, blues, and yellows isn’t only an appeal to nostalgia, but also a reminder of Superman’s original purpose. His primary-colored suit was not an accidental design choice: red represents vitality and courage, blue trust and peace, and yellow warmth and optimism, tied together with the Kryptonian symbol for hope—that is, Superman’s iconic “S” logo. Together, they create a hero whose very appearance communicates that he is visible, approachable, and inspirational. And this 2025 interpretation of Superman practices the values he visibly symbolizes in that he intends to do no harm, and he tries to show care for every living being, no matter how small.

Audiences have been conditioned for years to see desaturation as a sign of maturity. The assumption has been that brighter and simpler colors equate to childishness, which doesn’t hold appeal for the large audiences to whom superhero franchises try to market themselves. Gunn’s Superman challenges this idea and shows that brightness does not equal naïveté. It takes more courage to wear hope openly than to hide behind grim palettes.

Consider Superman’s historical counterpart, Batman. His stories have always been rooted in a noir tradition, and a darker palette serves to enhance his myth. Superman, by contrast, was never meant to operate from the shadows. He’s a hero who soars across open skies and draws his very strength from the sun. To strip him of his color is to reduce his hope-filled origins. Gunn’s refusal to do so feels less like a stylistic quirk, and more like a course correction.

Maybe this course correction is coming at the right cultural moment. The early 2020s, like the 1930s, have been continuously marked by economic and societal uncertainty, fear, and fragmentation. From global crises to personal anxieties, for many people,

the world can feel muted on its own. Do audiences really need their heroes to mirror this bleakness, or do they need heroes that stand apart from it? Gunn seems to have answered with the latter. His Superman doesn’t deny the existence of darkness, but it

isn’t defined by it.

The return to bright colors could also signal a turning point for the superhero genre in a broader sense. After years of the superhero genre dominating the silver screens, audiences are tired with endless sequels, sprawling multiverses, and the unending bids for maximizing consumerism. Superhero fatigue is real, but maybe what people are tired of is not the heroes themselves, but the repetitiveness of their cinematic presentation. Gunn’s Superman shows us that freshness can come not only from plot twists or new villains, but from something as deceptively simple and nostalgic as authentically embracing one’s source material. In this way, Gunn connects Superman back to his roots. The suit’s cartoonish outer underwear and spandex design might strike some as silly, but they help us reject the idea that heroism must be grim and

armed to the teeth to be taken seriously. Watching Superman reminds us of the simple optimism the Man of Steel was originally made to represent and tries to give us a spark of hope in today’s painful world.

---

Sasha Jayne is a junior in the College studying Psychology, and is one of the current Commentary editors as well as the current Social Media Manager. Their true loves and passions are metal and punk music, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and wearing excessive amounts of black clothing.