![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/030833a9fb596cfca2500fa6be129622eb-superman-jamesgunn.rsquare.w330.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n He woke up like this.
\n Photo: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n
Is it woke to be nice? That\u2019s essentially what Superman<\/a> director James Gunn is wondering regarding conservative backlash to his\u00a0latest contribution to the DCU<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019ve heard people say it was woke, and then I\u2019ve heard a lot of people say it\u2019s not,\u201d he said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly<\/a>. \u201cI am curious as to what in the movie is considered woke.\u201d Gunn theorized that the controversy may have been sparked after a July 4 article in The Times<\/a> of London in which he was asked whether the film would be an immigrant story like its comic-book source material. Several right-wing pundits (and former TV Superman Dean Cain<\/a>) were rankled by the interview, which came amid protests against immigration raids<\/a> in the U.S. \u201cI said, yeah, it\u2019s a story about an immigrant,\u201d Gunn recalled, \u201cbut mostly it\u2019s a story to me about kindness, which it is.\u201d<\/p>\n To Gunn, kindness would impact \u201ceverything\u201d from the way people vote to how many people die from road rage, he suggested to EW. \u201cI mean, people did value kindness in the past,\u201d he continued. \u201cThat was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn\u2019t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn\u2019t about anything other than that.\u201d Despite viral tweets<\/a> and impassioned Letterboxd reviews<\/a>, Gunn previously denied<\/a> that he was thinking about Israel and Palestine when writing the script. \u201cIt\u2019s an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that\u2019s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country,\u201d he insisted. \u201cIt really is fictional.\u201d<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He woke up like this. Photo: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection Is it woke to be nice? That\u2019s essentially what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,208,23610,206,3,111,209],"class_list":{"0":"post-27245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-james-gunn","10":"tag-media-literacy","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-superman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}