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James Gunn’s Superman nails a lot of elements — its earnest take on the Man of Steel, a scene-stealing Jimmy Olsen as an unexpected heartthrob, and a fiercely driven Lois Lane. But just as worthy of praise is Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, who captures the character’s signature pettiness with pitch-perfect precision.
Luthor sees himself as the smartest person in the DC universe, and in Superman, he might also be the richest. But he’s also extremely insecure and petty, especially when it comes to Superman. Gunn leans heavily into those elements with his Luthor, paralleling one of the character’s most notorious reveals from Bruce Timm’s 2004 animated series Justice League Unlimited.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Luthor’s plots in Superman and Justice League Unlimited.]
In Justice League Unlimited, an alternate universe version of Superman kills that world’s U.S. president, Lex Luthor, and leads the local version of the Justice League — the authoritarian Justice Lords — into the prime timeline. Although the real Justice League defeats them, the U.S. government grows increasingly concerned about the possibility of their own heroes turning rogue, prompting the creation of a contingency task force called Cadmus.
Tensions escalate when the prime universe’s Lex Luthor announces his bid for the presidency. Initially, he appears reformed, with seemingly noble goals. He even builds an energy-efficient city that Superman ends up destroying, due to his distrust of Luthor’s plans. However, it’s later revealed that Luthor is secretly working with Cadmus, and that his real plan is to push Superman into losing control and killing him, hoping to prove that the Man of Steel is fundamentally dangerous and untrustworthy.
The Question uncovers that the Justice Lords’ alternate reality isn’t just a parallel universe, it’s a glimpse into the inevitable future of his own timeline. In this loop, Luthor always rises to the presidency, the Flash always dies, and with him, the League loses its moral center. This sets the stage for Superman to eventually cross the line by killing Luthor, effectively overthrowing the U.S. government in the process.
The Question confronts Superman, only to learn he and the League are aware that events are playing out the same way in their world as they did in the future they’ve already seen. The Question even tries to disrupt the future by attempting to kill Luthor himself, so Superman can’t. Then Luthor reveals his Cadmus-supplied superpowers by sucker-punching The Question, and drops the reveal that his presidential campaign was “a farce, a small part of a much grander scheme,” and that he “spent $75 million on a fake presidential campaign, all just to tick Superman off.”
Like his animated counterpart, the Luthor in the 2025 Superman is carrying out a complicated war against Superman that comes with a huge cash outlay: He covertly supplies the fictional nation of Boravia with $80 billion in weapons, plotting with the Boravian president to seize control of neighboring Jarhanpur, then split the country between them.
Later, the 2025 Luthor tells Superman in a hubrisitic supervillain monologue that the entire Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict was engineered as a pretext — his ultimate goal was never power, but a justification to eliminate Superman. “I think you overestimate the importance of Jarhanpur to me, Superman,” he says. “That was just a bonus. I’m not killing you so that the Boravian military conflict can proceed. I created the Boravian military conflict so I’d have an excuse to kill you!” Just like in JLU, Luthor feels he has to tell his enemy all the nuances of his plan before killing them, so he can gloat about how smart he is.
Spending billions and treating both a kingship and the presidency as an aside, just to destroy the man he despises most, is peak Lex Luthor. He has the brilliance and resources to hold any position of power, or to genuinely make the world a better place. But he’d rather dedicate it all to eliminating Superman. Luthor is a genius, but also incredibly vapid, unable to cope with the love and admiration Superman receives for his strength and selflessness.
Deep down, he knows that no matter how powerful or accomplished he becomes, he’ll never measure up to what Superman represents. He’s one of the pettiest supervillains to ever exist. This is why Luthor remains the perfect foil to Superman, no matter how many times DC tries to parallel him with Batman. And it’s why Gunn’s version of Luthor is right up there with the JLU‘s as the best iterations of the character.
