How Superman’s Classic Suit Symbolized His Story In Justice League’s Knightmare

Superman’s classic red and blue suit was an essential element of his story in both Zack Snyder’s Knightmare future and Snyder’s overall planned five-movie story. With the arrival of Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max, and more recently on home media, Superman’s return from his death is one of the countless areas where the Snyder Cut is drastically different from the 2017 theatrical version, the latter stitched together from extensive reshoots and patches of Snyder’s original footage. Superman’s return homages his comic book resurrection with the Man of Steel donning his famed black suit emblazoned with a silver S-shield, but Snyder’s reasoning for this departs from that of the comics.

While Superman’s main use of the suit in the comics was as a tool to get him back up to full power after his resurrection, Snyder has positioned both suits as having a much more symbolic purpose in Superman’s journey in the films. In the source material, the color change helps Superman attract more yellow solar radiation – the main source of his incredible abilities. However, in the Snyder Cut, the character dons the iconic costume after walking through the crashed Kryptonian ship in Metropolis, hearing echoed memories of both his biological and adopted fathers. This gives the suit both metaphorical and practical power.

The stance of Warner Bros. is that the Snyder Cut is to be the last of Snyder’s DC movies. Despite that, there is a fairly detailed blueprint of how Justice League 2 and Justice League 3 were intended to conclude the five-part arc through a collection of whiteboards outlining the plan. When it comes to Superman’s role in it, both his classic and black suits were to have more significance to his character arc than simply different colored versions of his caped outfit. Both also connected to the Knightmare in different ways, while the red and blue suit was an essential piece of the final chapter of Superman’s journey in the story Snyder planned. Here’s how both of Superman’s suits relate to the Knightmare, and the meaning each had for his arc.

Superman’s Classic & Black Suits Represented His Journey

With the trajectory Snyder had mapped out for Superman in his five-part arc, he intended for whatever Kryptonian suit Superman was wearing at a given time to be emblematic of where he was on his hero’s journey. In an interview with Comic Book Debate, Snyder stated that at each point of the story, “Superman had to, at every step, sort of level up and learn something, and be something different.” He also described the black suit as “a great time delineator” to symbolize Superman’s resurrection as marking a specific point in his story.

Snyder has also described the difference between the red and blue suit and black suits in an interview with the Minuteman podcast, saying his classic suit is more “the suit of a hero” and the black suit is “more about his family.” Superman was to remain in the black suit as a current member of the Justice League, until Darkseid’s murder of Lois Lane and use of the Anti-Life Equation brought the Man of Steel under his control, and back into the red and blue suit in the Knightmare, with Batman forming a plan to undo this future. With the plan for him to don said suit again for the final battle with Darkseid in Justice League 3, the transition back to his classic suit would be his final transformation into Superman fully realized. This also shows why the black suit wouldn’t have been workable in the Knightmare.

Snyder’s Story Meant Superman’s Black Suit Wouldn’t Work In The Knightmare

On the surface, with Justice League 2 to have ventured into the idea of a villainous Superman, the Man of Steel wearing the black suit as Darkseid’s soldier could have been emblematic of his dark turn. However, Snyder’s classification of the black suit as a “time delineator” necessitated keeping Superman’s time in the two suits distinct and clearly defined. The more ceremonial nature of the red and blue suit presents Superman as Krypton’s emissary to another world, which is certainly not the role he’d be filling under an intergalactic, supremely powerful conqueror like Darkseid.

The black suit, consistent with the day-to-day wear of Kryptonians, is more personal in nature, and doesn’t carry the same formal Superman image with it. To portray Superman in truly antagonistic terms, the red and blue suit was necessary to show it was Superman, far more so than Kal-El, as the hero involuntarily turned into the greatest weapon Apokolips had in Darkseid’s conquest of Earth. Snyder even said as much in an interview with Cinemablend, commenting that “Once he succumbs to Anti-Life, he goes back into the blue and red.” With the specific purpose that the two suits were to serve in Snyder’s arc, this also shows some of the deeper symbolic meaning of Superman donning the suit in the Knightmare, as seen in Batman v Superman and in the epilogue of the Snyder Cut, and later returning to it in Justice League 3.

Justice League 2 Could Have Changed The Meaning Of Superman’s Suit

With Superman having debuted all the way back in 1938, it’s easy to forget today that he was originally shown as a villain in the short story “The Reign of the Superman”. This version of Superman was more of a proto-Braniac with cerebral powers, with Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster later revamping their concept into what became the Superman of Action Comics #1. While Snyder was never going to show Superman as evil, Darkseid bringing him under his control with the ultimate weapon in the Anti-Life Equation still turned Superman into a dark inversion of the hero he had been before that. Externalizing Superman as a warrior for Apokolips by having him in the black suit in the Knightmare wouldn’t have had the same impact as Clark donning the classic suit once more, the image of Superman as a hero now truly shattered as he fights for Darkseid in his more quintessential outfit.

By the same token, once Superman was freed from Darkseid’s control after The Flash succeeded in averting the Knightmare timeline, Kal-El’s return to the red and blue suit would now carry its most triumphant meaning ever. Having worn the suit while fighting on the side of Darkseid and Apokolips, Superman would be reclaiming his heroic identity as the ultimate rebuttal to what Darkseid tried to turn him into. In Snyder’s original Justice League plan, Superman is now leading the Justice League and the forces of humanity in a last stand against Darkseid, and per Snyder’s whiteboard outline, “The entire world becomes a Justice League.” Snyder’s reasoning behind the suit changes makes sense when Superman’s story is read in its totality, with both suits representing different points of Kal-El presenting himself to the world as both a hero and a Kryptonian.

It’s not uncommon in superhero movies for characters to adopt new variations of their heroic attire. However, Superman’s shift from his classic red and blue suit to the black suit and back again in Snyder’s planned story reflected not just the horror of a dark Superman in the post-apocalyptic world of the Knightmare, but his entire heroic journey. The last two parts of that story continue to be a source of growing public interest in the ongoing #RestoreTheSnyderVerse campaign, but with Superman returning in his black suit in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the underlying meaning of both it and his more traditional suit carried a lot of weight for where Snyder intended for that story to go.