DC’s Steel is Due For a Live-Action Redemption

Back in 1997, Steel hit theaters, making John Henry Irons (played by NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal) one of the quickest characters to turn around from creation to adaptation in the modern era. The character, created by Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove in 1993 as part of the “Death and Return of Superman” storyline, was originally one of four characters who DC said might actually be Superman. After the hero’s death, and funeral, his body vanished, and shortly thereafter, four heroes sporting the Superman crest on their chests found their way to the streets of Metropolis to fill the void left by the death of the Man of Tomorrow at the hands of Doomsday.

Two of them — a Cyborg later revealed to be Hank Henshaw, and a then-nameless Kryptonian who turned out to be The Eradicator — claimed to actually be the resurrected Superman, while another (Superboy, later named Conner Kent) was pretty open about his origins as a Cadmus Project clone from the start. The last, John Henry Irons, never claimed to be anything but a guy trying to do right by Superman’s legacy and help the people in his community. As you might expect, Steel turned out to be the most-loved of the characters and some fans even speculated he might really be Superman, with the Man of Steel’s spirit somehow placed inside John’s body.

In reality, John Henry Irons was a weapons designer in a suit of armor, just like Tony Stark. There are some big differences, both in his past (Irons gave up weapons design and changed his name to get away from his old bosses) and his present (not a billionaire, Steel lived in a modest, multigenerational house and worked as a construction worker). His backstory was that, when he fell from an under-construction skyscraper during his lunch break, Irons was saved by Superman. When Irons asked how he could repay the hero, Superman said to do something positive with his life.

His heart, humor, and deep bench of interesting supporting cast members made John Henry Irons one of the best new characters of the ’90s, and it was hardly surprising that when Shaq was asked what project he might like to do for Warner Bros., he pitched them an adaptation of a towering, Black superhero with a winning personality and a love for Superman. A tattoo O’Neal already had, which featured the Superman emblem surrounded by the words “The Man of Steel,” even got its own cameo in the 1997 movie.

The problem, then, wasn’t the movie. It wasn’t even O’Neal, who had done a passable job in Blue Chips and Kazaam, and whose good nature and self-depreciating humor gave Steel moments of heart. Instead, it was the film’s script and direction. Seemingly afraid of the very idea of a movie set in the DC Universe, filmmaker Kenneth Johnson (Short Circuit 2) took away Steel’s cape, any connection to Superman, and essentially any element of the story that would feel larger-than-life. He even removed the armor’s ability to fly, creating one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes in any superhero movie when he saves an elderly couple, and then glides very slowly away from them on an escalator, in a subversion of the “up, up, and away” expectation the audience surely had.

With superheroes not only omnipresent, but two different versions of Superman gracing our screens in 2021 (Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Tyler Hoechlin in Superman & Lois), one might wonder whether Steel could be on the horizon again.

With a lot of the discourse on social media about DC’s films being about hope, and a push to diversify the largely-white superhero universes on screen, it seems like a no-brainer — and, indeed, it feels like now is the time to bring John Henry Irons back for another shot in the live-action spotlight.

The Metropolis of Superman & Lois is largely unmapped, with only small kernels of information known. Even those might be wrong, post-Crisis, so it seems like it would be incredibly easy to introduce John, and maybe even his niece Nat (who would later follow him into the armored-superhero business), in that show. Failing that, the death of Superman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice left a big hole in the DC film universe, but most of the specifics were never explored. We can safely assume there weren’t four Supermen vying for the title, or it would have come up in Justice League, but honestly, the idea of a dude in armor protecting poor neighborhoods during the post-Death of Superman riots? That’s an entirely plausible scenario.

Even in his own stand-alone story, Steel as a character and as a property could easily carry a reasonably-budgeted feature. Not with Shaq in the lead role and an aging, white TV director behind the camera, ideally, but instead as the kind of film that Black filmmakers and actors rarely got a shot at in 1997, but are starting to be able to produce now. The original actually had some of that ambition; for all his faults, Johnson was aware that the movie was a trailblazer in terms of a major superhero movie with a Black lead, and sought out to do justice to that. It just so happens he fell short, and likely was never the right guy to make the attempt.

What do you think? Would you like to see John Henry Irons come back to the screen in some form or another? And if it happens, should Shaq get a cameo? Let us know in the comments, or yell at me on Twitter at @russburlingame!