The Rock Responds to Henry Cavill Announcing Superman Return: "We Fought for Years to Bring You Back"

Dwayne Johnson took to social media today, sharing yesterday's announcement video from Henry Cavill and expressing how excited he is to have the Man of Steel star back in the DC movie universe. Yesterday, Cavill said that his cameo appearance in Black Adam was "a very small taste of things to come," and rumors have been circulating that a stand-alone Superman movie is one of the properties in active development at Warner Bros. Discovery. That may seem counterintuitive, considering The Rock's repeated claims that he had to fight tooth and nail to get Cavill back, but it also lines up with new CEO David Zaslav's move away from niche and obscure characters and his desire to embrace Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in a big way.

The actor was cast as Clark Kent/Superman for 2013's Man of Steel. He reprised the role in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League (both versions), with rumors and fan demands running more or less nonstop since BvS that Cavill would eventually get a Superman sequel.

"We fought for years to bring you back," Johnson wrote on Twitter. "They always said no. But to [Dany and Hiram Garcia] & myself 'no' was not an option. We can't build out our DCEU w/out the world's greatest superhero. And fans will always come first." 

Man of Steel, from director Zack Snyder, kicked off DC's interconnected film universe, and the trend of Snyder's DC movies being intensely loved and intensely hated by warring factions of the audience. Batman v Superman only exacerbated that dynamic, and then Justice League turned out to be a disaster so profound it took five years and a director's cut before Warners could move forward from it.

Even among Snyder's harshest critics, the performances turned in by Cavill and Amy Adams as Superman and Lois Lane have mostly drawn praise. You could print out enough glib "He's a great Superman, too bad he was stuck in those movies" tweets to wallpaper the White House. In spite of that, the former management at Warners was apparently resistant to bringing Cavill back, with Black Adam star Dwayne Johnson saying he had to fight tooth and nail to secure a cameo for Cavill. 

Rumors have been circulating in recent weeks that the star's Black Adam cameo was part of a larger push to get a new movie for Cavill. How and whether that movie will be impacted by the events of The Flash remains to be seen. At one point, rumors circulated saying that The Flash would include a sequence time-traveling into the events of Man of Steel.