‘Superman’ Production Designer Breaks Down Sets From James Gunn Film

***WARNING! The following contains spoilers for Superman (2025)!***

Beth Mickle learned she’d be designing the sets for James Gunn’s fresh blockbuster take on the Man of Steel over text. In particular, it was producer and Gunn’s co-head of DC Studios, Peter Safran, who broke the exciting news to her with four words:

“You ready for Superman?!”

“I got the script a couple days later and started talking with James immediately,” recalls the production designer, who previously worked with the filmmaker on The Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. “You just pinch yourself when a title like that comes your way. You just pinch yourself that you’re going to get the opportunity to work on something as iconic as that.”

Set three years into the Kryptonian’s crime-fighting career, Superman sees David Corenswet (Hollywood, Twisters) as the latest actor to don the red cape and trunks.

To that end, Gunn presents a big, beautiful comic book adventure that effectively resets the onscreen DC Universe with eye-popping style and panache, while reminding us why the Man of Tomorrow remains the most beloved iconic of all time.

“He wanted this to be a really bright and hopeful film,” Mickle explains. “That, above all, everybody should leave the theater with a sense of optimism. And that was just such a wonderful thing for all of us to aspire to every day making that film. He was also really clear that he wanted it to be vivid and colorful, really bright, to make a clear departure from what had come before us, and to lay out a bold new vision for what we would be trying to do moving forward. And just as James Gunn films always are, they’re really vivid, they’re really graphic, they’re really exciting visually. So for a production designer, partnering with him is always a thrill.”

The ultimate goal was to make the world of Superman feel different from the “much grittier, layered, textured world” of the Guardians trilogy, she explains.

“[Those movies deal]

a lot with the tertiary colors, which are the magentas, the aqua colors, the golds and oranges. We wanted this one to feel a little cleaner and more simplistic in the surfaces and in the shapes. We wanted the colors to really be the Superman primary colors, and some of the secondary colors. So really bold, reds, blues, yellows, greens, oranges. We only get into some of those Guardians of the Galaxy-esque colors — the purples, the pinks, the the aquas — when we go into the Underworld, which is Lex Luthor’s pocket universe. We wanted to make sure that the world of Metropolis really stood on its own as this hopeful, beautiful, timeless arena.”

Breaking down the biggest sets of James Gunn’s Superman (2025) film with production designer Beth Mickle

Fortress of Solitude

“It was really important to us to pay respects to all the iconic Superman imagery that came before us,” Mickle says. “[When it came to] the Fortress of Solitude, for example, we wanted to make sure that we gave a really nice wink to the Richard Donner version that was all made out of crystals, and how those crystals intersected. “We just wanted to make sure we really paid respects to what came before us, make sure audiences felt like we were doing justice to what the expectations were, but also make sure we had a fresh, new vision for it as well.”

Superman’s impressive Arctic hideaway was brought to life with “actual resin crystals and foam for all the stonework,” Mickle reveals. “It took us about three months of R&D to figure out how to actually make those crystals. There was a lot of trial and error on figuring those out. Our amazing construction team was very dedicated to figuring out the formula to make it work, and we filled a 40,000 square-foot stage, pretty much end to end, with the entire set. That was just an honor to design and build.”

(Check out behind-the-scenes photos at the bottom of this article).

LuthorCorp

Gunn wanted the LuthorCorp control room, from which the chrome-domed supervillain (Nicholas Hoult) and his minions scheme against the Man of Steel “to feel like an observatory where you have this 180-degree view looking out to the city,” Mickle says.

“That was really driven by all the action that had to happen in there. And then we decided to give it a kind of tiered layout. So that when you’re looking back, you always see stacks of all the people that are working for him and get a sense of all the commotion that’s happening in there all the time. Domenic Silvestri, our art director, did a beautiful job laying all that out and getting that build to the finish line.”

That same space, once halved and leveled out, became Lex’s personal office, allowing the crew to make the most of their available space and budget.

“It was very ‘70s-inspired for the finishes. All the green marble to get the the Lex Luthor color from the comic books in there and really, really graphic lines,” notes the production designer. “The whole ceiling is all referenced from these beautiful 1970s coffered ceilings. We have a nice, big graphic element that happens over top.”

Lex Luthor’s pocket dimension

“That was a wild world to explore. James said that he wanted it to be a dark underworld,” Mickle recalls. “And in the script, it even said that it was a world made up of arithmetic. That just gets your mind going right away. What does arithmetic look like? How is arithmetic expressed architecturally?”

In the end, art director Samantha Avila suggested basing in the overall aesthetic on bismuth, a crystalline element “that grows geometrically in these perfect little right angles and has this really beautiful iridescence,” Mickle says. “It was tough to crack what that world would be at first, but as soon as we figured out the cubes and the bismuth, everything else fell into place really quickly. It’s fun to see what a distinct difference it is from the rest of the bright, colorful movie.”

Daily Planet offices

The Daily Planet officers were not built on a soundstage, but within Terminal Station, a now-defunct railroad depot in Macon, Georgia. “It’s a beautiful historic space, but also a bit of a blank slate,” Mickle says. “So when we figured out all of our colors in the beginning of the movie, we decided that orange tone was going to be assigned to the Daily Planet. You can see a lot of orange and autumnal undertones in all the set dressing, and in a lot of the costumes as well.”

She continues: “We did look at a lot of newsrooms, and it was really important to James that we had screens everywhere, so you could see that it was an advanced media company. It does have all the screens and videos playing around you at all times. But we also wanted it to feel timeless, so you’ll see we have landline phones at all the desks [for] a little bit of a vintage nod. We [also] made sure that the computers weren’t the most cutting-edge. It was [also] a lot of paper products, which is not always the case in newsrooms today. Things have gone more digital, but we stacked up paper everywhere.”

While the production shied away from the traditional Art Deco look oft-associated with the Daily Planet (and Metropolis at large), Mickle did include a tribute to Superman’s retro origins with custom murals from graphic designer Mary Shriner. “She just did a beautiful job on those,” shares the production designer. “Some of my favorite parts of that whole set is when you look in the background and see all these Art Deco murals.”

Lois Lane’s apartment

Lois’s apartment gives “the sense that she brings her work home with her,” Mickle says. “We looked at a lot of writers’ spaces. We looked at where Joan Didion worked and just tried to make sure that it felt like an authentic writer’s home … James had said he wanted it to feel like it was like an old New York City pre-war building. I’d spent a number of years in New York, so I knew that architecture very well — the moldings, the built-in bookcases, this tiny little kitchen, all the fun layers of paint and tile.”

Actress Rachel Brosnahan also provided input on how Lois’s hectic life as a reporter would be reflected in the character’s living space, namely through stacked-up dishes and laundry. “She said that she’s the kind of woman who’s organized enough to do her laundry on Sundays and fold it all. So there would be stacks of folded laundry, but she just didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to put everything away,” Mickle says. “So in the background, in her bedroom, you’ll see stacks of laundry and little piles of things here and there that she organized, but never got to really tuck away.”

In addition, the actress suggested that Lois be utilitarian in her eating habits. “She’s the kind of person who has one thing that she likes to eat and goes for it,” explains the production designer. And so, they settled on granola bars as the character’s regular snack of choice. “Those would always be within arm’s reach, [with] a lot of little bowls in the kitchen and at her desk at the Daily Planet. You can see these little fake granola bars we made. That really thoughtful and authentic detail came from Rachel.”

Hall of Justice

Interestingly, the Hall of Justice scenes were filmed at the very building that inspired the fictional headquarters in the original comics: Cincinnati Union Terminal.

“What a wonderful treat to get to go back to the original source of what it was supposed to be and actually shoot the exterior, use that real inspiration from the original, and get to put that in the movie,” emphasizes Mickle. “And then we were just so lucky that the interior was so striking and well-preserved. That’s one of my favorite scenes, when we get in there and and turn and look toward that huge, gorgeous ceiling and those front windows. I grin every single time.”

If you notice, the interior of the Hall is under renovation, which was not a framing gaffe, but a deliberate choice by the filmmakers. “We brought all that in because we wanted to show that this is the new space the Justice League is moving into. James had the idea that the Hall of Justice was provided to the Justice Gang by a benefactor, and that the benefactor would have bought an old, disused train station and let them set up shop there. The idea is that they have just started to move in.”

Could that mysterious benefactor be billionaire Bruce Wayne? “I’ll leave that to be discovered in future films,” Mickle teases. “But yes, they have a benefactor.”

Streets of Metropolis

Since the production was already in Cincinnati, Gunn & Co. decided to use the famous Ohio city for the exterior of Metropolis, which allowed Mickle to incorporation a number of subtle Easter eggs around town.

“When you see Superman fall in the very beginning of the movie, he comes falling back down to earth and goes through the sidewalk. Malik, the vendor, helps him get up, and you can see a big museum of modern art behind him,” Mickle says. “It was a big bank building we turned it into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you look in all the windows, the artwork shows birds morphing into planes. And the idea is [a reference to] ‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superman!’” We worked really hard on that.”

She also reveals that nearly every written name — “in street signs, in a directory, or in a book” — is a reference to iconic DC artists, members of the film crew, and, most important of all, Superman’s two creators: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. “So if anybody wants to go back up and look up what all those street names are, it’s really fun,” she himts. “You’ll be able to tie it to somebody significant to the film.”

Kent family farmhouse

“James was really clear that he didn’t want it to feel like the big, sprawling, idyllic farm houses that we’ve seen before in the Superman lore,” Mickle remembers. “He felt like it should be a very well-loved, humble home that had loving parents that tended to this farm. But it wasn’t a big, sprawling, generational farm of hundreds of acres and massive square footage … Our wonderful location manager, Ian [Easterbrook], sent out his scouts, and about an hour south of where the stages were, they found this absolutely beautiful farm [with] very idyllic rolling hills. Of course, it had the giant farmhouse across the street, but the house that we ended up filming in was the little in-laws’ cottage right next to the barns and surrounded by farmland.”

Fortunately, the crew didn’t have to change much of the interior, which already had a charming, lived-in quality to it. “The paint color was already yellow, it had this great shaggy carpet inside. We embraced a lot of that,” the production designer continues. “We did a little painting inside and then Rosemary Brandenburg, our set decorator, redressed the whole inside. But a lot of it was already just part of the beautiful fabric of what that home was to start with.”

She goes on to discuss the look of Clark’s childhood bedroom:

“Rosemary had a great idea of looking at all the little things that Clark would have explored as a kid. You’ll see a little space shuttle and rock collections in the background. He thought he could’ve have been an athlete so there’s a little nod [to that with] baseball caps. Also family photos everywhere. We wanted it to be very warm and inviting and a place where a little boy would have loved growing up — just to make it clear that Ma and Pa Kent made a loving home for him as a little boy, and that he was really supported. And then the idea was that after he left for [college], he hadn’t come back to live there, so it kind of remained a little bit of a time capsule of his years of growing up there. Now that I think about it, too, the bedspread and curtains have some Superman colors in there. It was a nice little nod to what was going to come.”

Check out behind-the-scenes photos from James Gunn’s Superman (2025)

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