Just six short years ago, James Gunn and his friends made a movie about an evil version of teenage Superman. Not Bizarro Superman or Ultraman. An unofficial, deranged, and horrifying version that killed his own parents and wanted to destroy the earth with pure teenage angst. Who instead of saving squirrels, watched girls in their bedrooms late at night. Oh, and exploded lightbulb shards into a waitress’s eyeball before ripping apart her insides and placing them in his spaceship clubhouse for his parents to find. The same guy who is now the co-running the entire DC Universe and director of the colorful, happy Superman of 2025 once spearheaded the effort to create the antithesis to Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in a completely different way. It’s awesome that the powers that be let this meta-movie exist at all. That Sony allowed Gunn and company to make a hard-R, full-blast horror film version of one of the world’s most popular superheroes. This is the story of an evil superhero horror story that overcame a canceled Comic-Con appearance and a controversy that almost changed the entire landscape of superhero movies in general. Even more impossible, this is the story of how they made an anti-Superman movie featuring flying, eye lasers, destruction, and literal jaw dropping death sequences on less that one FORTIETH of the budget. And somehow made it look good. This is what happened to Brightburn.
Brightburn originally appeared to the world as “Untitled James Gunn Horror Project,” with a plan to unveil it properly at 2018’s San Diego Comic-Con. Gunn wasn’t meant to write or direct the mystery project but rather produce it. The writers would instead be Gunn’s brother, Brian Gunn, and his cousin, Mark Gunn, with the director’s chair going to his friend David Yarovesky. After bonding over video games, comic books, and movies, Gunn and Yarovesky had collaborated before on a VR game for The Belko Experiment, as well as, of all things, a David Hasselhoff music video that Yarovesky directed for Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy. This wasn’t an honorary producer title, however, with Yarovesky noting that he had the opportunity to sit next to Gunn each day on set. Yarovesky wasn’t without his own experience, having directed a feature horror film in 2014’s The Hive, as well as various other projects.
The conception of Brightburn was a group effort based around one simple premise: What if the story of Superman went horribly wrong? The foursome united around that vision and walked lockstep to the finish line. It was a hell of a time to be writing a non-Superman/Superman movie on the heels of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, which polarized the world in 2013. One look at the trailer and cinematography of Brightburn and it’s hard not to see in plain sight that the movie not only directly provides an alternate iteration of Superman, but of Snyder’s Superman world in particular. Both visually and narratively. Which, to be honest, is a really cool meta concept that could have made Wes Craven himself proud.
On the visual side of things, cinematographer Michael Dallatorre was hired for the job after working with Yarovesky on both The Hive and the Guardians of the Galaxy music video for “Inferno.” He and Yarovesky would have what they called “date nights,” watching a couple of horror movies and planning their approach. Having a director and cinematographer with experience making a lot happen with very little money would prove to be a necessary advantage, as Brightburn carried a budget of only around $6 million. For scope, the budgets of both Man of Steel and 2025’s Superman were around $225 million.
The role of our evil not-Superman, Brandon Breyer, was one that Gunn thought would be another tough hurdle to overcome. They needed a young teenager who could believably play a world-ending force of ghastly doom. Apparently, Gunn has never met a teenager. The casting crew were shocked when it only took one round of auditions to find their Brandon, with actor Jackson A. Dunn leaving no doubt after his audition. The roles of his parents had to be portrayed by actors capable of translating to the audience that they are both good parents. Even while arguably failing to make the correct choice multiple times throughout. Elizabeth Banks was an excellent casting choice in this regard, as her ability to portray her excitement and joy in her character finally becoming a mother is palpable. The role of the hot-headed but good-intentioned Kyle Breyer went to The Office and 13 Hours actor David Denman. Spending years being forced to watch Jim slowly infiltrate your relationship with your fiancée will prepare you for anything. Even adopting shithead Superman.
You may know Kyle’s now jawless best friend, Noah, as Badger from Breaking Bad, Matt Jones. As well as spotting frequent James Gunn collaborator and all-time character actor Michael Rooker in a cameo as a raging news anchor while the credits roll and Brightburn starts some more shit Mothman-style. Gunn and Rooker were obviously friends beforehand, with Yarovesky even portraying one of his Ravagers in the Guardians films. So, they asked him and obviously he said yes. A budget like this for a movie like this would no doubt require some favors like that to be called in.
All in all, the special effects of Brightburn would require a company known as Trixter (who also worked on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) to use a team of 64 artists who worked on 239 special effects shots with 192 of which making the movie.
The most complicated of their efforts would be a scene in which Brandon literally melts his adopted father’s face off with frickin’ laser beams. They took the actor’s physical reaction along with a dummy head and added layer after layer of skull and tissue digitally, revealing them to the audience one by one. Like a fancy cake. This pairing of both practical and digital effects would be paramount to them pulling off a movie with this many special effects on such a modest budget.
The most famous shot incorporating this is likely Noah losing his jaw in most heinous fashion after Brandon lifts his truck in the air and drops it, causing his face to quite literally eat his steering wheel. The jaw, moments later, would fall off his face hole like a piece of Stouffer’s Lasagna that had been left out in the rain. It’s super gross and awesome. To accomplish this, they added a practical jaw on his face that would drop down. They digitally removed his actual jaw before inserting a CG tongue and all the nasty flesh accompanying the ripping and the tearing. Or maybe it’s the scene where the waitress has a tube light explode into her face before forcing us to watch her pull a shard of glass out of her eyeball. They once again shot a scene of the actress physically reacting to the moment, so that the horror on her face and the movement of her non-impaled eyeball looked natural. They then built a replica of her head with a gashed eye full of various liquids. Fun fact, apparently, when you are stabbed in the eyeball, it doesn’t only leak blood. But various, multicolored mystery fluids. Yay! Who’s hungry?
Sound design became super important to create the horror of Brightburn, especially when considering the budget. In the scene where the waitress is slowly hunted by Brandon while bleeding out of her eye, the director takes us literally inside her skull. They use sound panning and reverb to make it feel as though we are actively between her ears. The sound also aided in the horror throughout in a myriad of other ways. From hearing the spaceship and the voices in Brandon’s head to the sounds of him flying around and fucking the farmhouse up. During the moments the budget wouldn’t allow us to see it happening, the sound design at least let us hear it. These sounds of distraction and pain were provided by none other than Halloween (2018) sound designer PK Hooker. The score of Brightburn was provided by Pearl composer Timothy Williams, alongside the end credits Billie Eilish song “Bad Guy.”
Brandon’s mask was actually created by the director’s wife and the film’s costume designer, Autumn Steed, who had been tasked with creating an iconic horror mask for the character. The director asked her to come up with something that could hold its own sitting alongside characters like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers on fans Funko shelves. The costume itself tells a story throughout the film, as it dictates Brandon’s mindset as the events unfold. The color blue represents his connection to Earth, the red, his affiliation with his alien side. The film and his outfit would fascinatingly feature certain color palettes where one or the other would become more dominant depending on his mood.
These changes would often be dictated by the parents’ difficult choices regarding their impossible situation. The story of nature versus nurture is a prevalent one in Brandon’s saga. The writers compared it to the story of puberty in Stephen King’s Carrie, only from the parental point of view. They specifically reference the book Far From the Tree, about the parents of one of the Columbine shooters and how badly they felt for them. This provided some conflict internally when they saw some audiences at test screenings cheering on Brandon’s murder moments and they maintain this was not their intention. But rather a byproduct of an audience seeing and automatically identifying the main character of the story wearing a cape as the “good guy.” In truth, that’s just a byproduct of horror sometimes. We’ve all had a moment or five when we started rooting for Michael Myers to make arts and crafts out of annoying characters.
Originally, the plan had been to end with Brandon’s mother, Tori, successfully killing her son and surviving. It was James Gunn’s recommendation that evil win in this scenario. Something that audiences mostly appreciated as something fresh in a modern movie landscape where the good guy seems to always win.
The original plan for the debut announcement of Brightburn in all its glory was set to take place at San Diego Comic-Con in July of 2018. Instead, due to the fallout from inappropriate James Gunn tweets from his past resurfacing and his subsequent (and later reversed) firing from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the appearance was canceled. The Man of Steel-esque trailer instead debuted online in December of 2018, with the film debuting worldwide on May 24, 2019. A censored version with less violence premiered in the UK a month later.
The lower budget proved to be a salve for Brightburn, as it underperformed against expectations at the box office to the tune of $33 million worldwide. It finished in fifth place in its opening week, and in ninth place in week two thanks to a 70% drop in attendance. Reviews were mixed, and the film received a C+ CinemaScore from audience polling. Perhaps it was an even more saturated superhero landscape at the time that turned away audiences, but you can chalk Brightburn down as yet another film that’s surprisingly refreshing to revisit a few years down the road.
So, what does all this mean in regard to that banger post-film sequence involving Michael Rooker, a sea creature, Frank Darbo from Super, and a witch? In 2019, James Gunn alluded to the possibility of a sequel when he wasn’t so busy with Suicide Squad and Guardians Vol. 3. But then, in 2024, Gunn told a fan on Threads that the rights were fucked up, he only owned half of them, and it was unlikely that a sequel would ever happen.
If you’re looking for just a little ray of hope and sunshine in this scenario? The writer once said that they have a lot of ideas not just for a sequel but for an entire universe. And the director has also mentioned multiple times that if they ever were to announce a sequel, they would do it in the same surprising and random way they once announced Brightburn. It would essentially just drop out of the sky. So, you’re telling me there’s a chance. And that… is what happened to Brightburn.
A couple of the previous episodes of this show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!