TK Easter Eggs DC Fans Need to Know

The first trailer for writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman” which premiered Thursday morningmarks the official debut of the new Man of Steel as played by David Corenswet, as well as the love of Superman’s life, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and Superman’s archenemy, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).

talking with Black after a special preview of the trailer at the Warner Bros. lot on Dec. 17, Corenswet said the opportunity to finally show what he’d been working on for over a year and a half was “the best thing ever,” but he shrugged, when asked what it was like to see himself as Superman with an audience for the first time.

“I’m just separating myself,” Corenswet said. “It’s not me up there. It’s Superman. It’s Clark Kent. What’s cool is seeing all your friends up there.”

He’s not just talking about Brosnahan and Hoult, either. When Gunn and his fellow DC Studios co-head Peter Safran first announced their January 2023 outline, they made it clear that their reboot of Superman would also officially reboot the DC Universe as a fully unified creative endeavor that would capture the rich breadth of established characters over nearly 90 years within the wider DC Comics. (The animated DC series “Creature Commandos,” currently streaming on Max, is intended to be a “gentle intro” to the DCU — an appetizer for “Superman’s” main course.)

In practice, this means that for the first time in the live-action “Superman” film franchise, it will launch into the same cinematic universe as dozens upon dozens of metahumans and super-powered creatures ranging from famous in their own right to totally obscure to the general public. Imagine Christopher Reeve’s Superman flying in the first “Superman” movie alongside Martian Manhunter, Hawkman and Blue Beetle — or Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark fighting in the first “Iron Man” movie along with Doctor Strange, Shang-Chi and Wanda Maximoff. The filmmakers and studios behind these earlier comic book movies believed that audiences could only handle one superhero at a time. But thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, moviegoers have been conditioned to accept a movie where a multitude of superheroes occupy the screen at the same time.

And good gravy, there are a lot of them in the first look at Gunn’s new film. Here’s a list of 17 DC characters and Easter eggs — from Superman’s dog to Krypto to Stagg Industries — hidden inside the “Superman” trailer.