Adam revisits James Gunn’s Superman one year after its release and looks at how it holds up as DC heads toward Supergirl. We discuss why the movie’s relentlessly positive take on Superman works, why the character needed to be rebuilt before being deconstructed, and how David Corenswet’s Superman fits into a modern, complicated world without losing the “big blue boy scout” core. Adam also talks through the film’s weaker third act, the Superman clone problem, the hypno-glasses explanation, and the standout Mr. Terrific sequence. From there, the discussion shifts to DC Studios’ bigger issue: the messy selective continuity left behind by The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, Amanda Waller, Rick Flag, Harley Quinn, and the old DCEU baggage James Gunn’s reboot still has not fully escaped.

The countdown closes out Phase Two with the unlikeliest success in the run. Adam makes the case that Ant-Man works for the same reason the best MCU films always do, it follows Stan Lee's old rule and emphasizes the human, grounding a shrinking-suit heist in a father trying to do right by his daughter. Along the way: the eight-year Edgar Wright saga and the Peyton Reed handoff, the Quantum Realm and Sokovia Accords groundwork that paid off all the way through Endgame, and why Quantumania forgot everything this movie understood. A definitive Phase Two ranking and a full 5 out of 5. Next week: Civil War.

Adam revisits Lightyear, the 2022 prequel built on a premise it never delivers: that this was the movie a kid in 1995 fell in love with. A look at why the film feels nothing like a mid-90s kids' movie, how Buzz Lightyear of Star Command did the job better twenty years earlier, the Sox problem, and what Lightyear's absence from the Toy Story 5 trailer tells you. Plus the corporate context of the Investor Day that birthed it. As a standalone sci-fi it's a 3 or a 4, but chained to Toy Story, it's a 2 out of 5.