Man of Steel: Does Krypton Survive?

In a new story over at io9, a reader has caught something in a week-old Entertainment Weekly story that has the writers wondering: Does Superman’s home planet still exist in Man of Steel?Here’s the pertinent bit, from EW‘s summer movie preview:

In this iteration, Clark Kent’s heroic tendencies would rise to the surface only when the threat was great enough. It would have to be a global menace — one that might also trigger an internal conflict about whether he belongs on Earth even as he yearns to be among his own kind. That’s what pits him against General Zod (Boardwalk Empire‘s Michael Shannon), a Kryptonian tyrant who wants Clark to join him back on Krypton, which would mean abandoning his post as defender of the weaklings of Earth.

Now, based on this alone, a handful of folks are concerned that Krypton will survive, thus drastically altering Superman’s origin story and opening the door to many, many new Kryptonian characters down the line.Certainly that element has some appeal to writers, who have enjoyed using things like the Bottle City of Kandor for years (see the upcoming Superman: Unbound for more of that).But it seems really unlikely to us.Okay, so Entertainment Weekly reports that Zod “wants Clark to join him back on Krypton,” which certainly sounds damning, but consider the following:

• Zod was in custody, and may have been in the Phantom Zone, thus being out of the loop.
• It’s unclear how long it took Zod to find Superman, so if he was sent off-world, Krypton could have been destroyed in the interim.
• Entertainment Weekly could be simplifying something like “repopulating the dead planet” or “establishing a New Krypton” in order to make the brief summary more digestible to non-comics readers.
• Both Zod and Eradicator have, in the past, utilized a “We want to return Krypton to its glory and for some reason you have no choice but to help us” mentality. That could easily be applicable in any or all of the above.