Author and comic book writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reportedly has a reboot of Superman: Man of Steel in development which will feature a Black Superman for the very first time. Sources say that Coates’s script for the reboot is nearly ready to be handed over to Warner Brothers Studio for further development.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a storied writing career behind him, having held positions as a reporter with The Atlantic, The Village Voice, and TIME, among other publications. His independent writing career began in 2008 when he published The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir in which Coates details his father’s impact on his life as an ex-Black Panther. In his second memoir, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates details the struggles surrounding African-American lives, such as physical danger at the hands of racist extremists.
Coates’s other books, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy and The Water Dancer, also deal with heavy themes of racism, prejudice, and internal struggle from a nonfiction and fiction perspective, respectively. As far as graphic novels are concerned, Ta-Nehisi Coates has experience there as well: in 2016, he authored the sixth volume of Marvel’s Black Panther comics alongside Brian Stelfreeze.
What we know about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Superman
Coates initially announced his plans for a Black Superman reboot last year, and according to MovieWeb, the film will take place outside of the established DCEU, much like Matt Reeves’s The Batman did earlier this year. Reports also confirm that aside from the obvious presence of a Black Superman, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Superman will function much like his previous incarnations, being born on Krypton and then coming to Earth. This new Superman story is rumored to take place in the 20th century, however, unlike most of its modern counterparts. According to Screen Rant, J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot production company have signed onto the film as executive producers, with Hannah Minghella as a producer and the film likely to hire a Black director.
Aside from the script being ready soon, little is currently known about the timeline of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Superman at the moment, especially since Warner Brothers currently have Val-Zod in production on HBO Max with Michael B. Jordan as an executive producer, as well as Superman & Lois continuing to air on the CW.
