The live action history breaks into four attempts to define the character for a mass audience: the serials, the Christopher Reeve films, the Zack Snyder films, and the 2025 relaunch.
Kirk Alyn played him first, in the 1948 Columbia serial Superman and its 1950 sequel Atom Man vs. Superman. George Reeves took over for the 1951 feature Superman and the Mole Men and then for Adventures of Superman, the series that ran to 1958 and made the character a fixture of American childhood.
Format · film serial and television series
Directed by Richard Donner, starring Christopher Reeve, with Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Marlon Brando as Jor-El. The campaign promised audiences they would believe a man could fly, and the result established that the genre could be produced at scale and taken seriously.
Format · theatrical feature
Superman II brought General Zod to Earth in 1980 and is generally held to be the strongest sequel. Superman III moved towards comedy with Richard Pryor in 1983, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, made on a sharply reduced budget in 1987, ended the run. Reeve played the part in all four.
Format · theatrical features
Bryan Singer cast Brandon Routh and wrote the film as a loose continuation of the Donner pictures rather than a restart, opening after a five year absence. It performed adequately but not well enough to trigger the planned sequels, and the series was shelved.
Format · theatrical feature
Zack Snyder's Man of Steel introduced Henry Cavill in a darker, heavily science fiction retelling of the origin and launched a shared universe. Cavill returned for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 and Justice League in 2017, with Snyder's own four hour cut released in 2021.
Format · theatrical features
Written and directed by James Gunn, with David Corenswet as Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. It skips the origin completely and opens on a Superman who has been working for three years. A sequel, Man of Tomorrow, is scheduled for 2027.
Format · theatrical feature
Television kept a separate continuity throughout. Lois & Clark ran from 1993 to 1997 and Smallville from 2001 to 2011, followed by Superman & Lois with Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch, which reframed the character as a father raising two teenage sons.
Format · television seriesAnimation shaped the character as much as the comics did. Flight, the opening narration and several visual conventions still in use were settled by the 1941 shorts before they ever reached print.
Seventeen theatrical shorts made by Fleischer Studios and then Famous Studios between 1941 and 1943. They were among the most expensive cartoons produced at the time, the first was nominated for an Academy Award, and the rotoscoped animation and art deco Metropolis are still copied. They are now public domain.
Format · theatrical shorts
The New Adventures of Superman, produced by Filmation from 1966, returned him to Saturday morning television. From 1973 Super Friends put him at the head of a Justice League line up for more than a decade, and for a generation of viewers that show, not the comics, was the primary version.
Format · television series
Produced by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini after Batman: The Animated Series and voiced by Tim Daly. It is widely regarded as the best balanced adaptation of the character, and it fed straight into Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, which ran to 2006 with George Newbern in the role.
Format · television series
DC's direct to video line adapted several major comics, including All-Star Superman in 2011, The Death of Superman in 2018 and Superman: Red Son in 2020. The current television version is My Adventures with Superman, an anime influenced series that began in 2023 and follows Clark, Lois and Jimmy early in their careers.
Format · animated features and series