Superman’s Weird Mouth in Justice League Explained

By JUICE Malaysia • 17 Nov 2017 in News

Thirsty for JUICE content? Quench your cravings on our Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp

No spoilers ahead as we think it’s public knowledge that Superman is in the highly anticipated Justice League movie. It premiered yesterday in some parts of the world, including ours, and critics as well as fans all over were mixed on the quality of the film. While the fans who inexplicably liked Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice loved the film (obviously), others saw it as marginally better than the latter, though hesitant to dub it a ‘good movie’. Despite this disagreement in consensus though, what got everyone to nod together is how disturbing Superman’s – played by Henry Cavill – mouth looks in some scenes. It looks out of place and just plain weird, bordering on the uncanny valley despite being played by a real person.

This is basically our reaction to the movie. (Source: @markharrisnyc on Twitter)

For the most part, it looks okay, but in a few scenes, you can’t help but to stare in utter confusion, trying to understand why the mouth is just wrong. Well, here’s a perfectly logical explanation:

As we all know, big budget movies – like Justice League – always end up scheduling reshoots, but for whatever reasons (*cough* massive critical backlash of their previous DCEU movies *cough*), the Justice League reshoots took longer than usual. This left Cavill in a conflicted state as he had grown a moustache for Mission: Impossible 6 by Paramount. Paramount forbade him from shaving it off because shaving his moustache and then having to grow it again in itself would have forced an alteration in Mission: Impossible 6’s own production schedule.

So, the only thing they could do is to shoot Cavill with his moustache intact for Justice League. But since Superman is always clean-shaven, Warner Bros opted to CGI the moustache off.

This seemed like a great idea to them instead of using a fake moustache for Mission: Impossible 6. The end result proves otherwise – the heavy CGI work is obvious when you look at his mouth. It moved in an unnatural way – like copy and paste.

There you go, the answers to why Superman’s appearance looked awfully off.

That’s an awfully small issue though, you can judge Justice League for yourself as it is out in cinemas now. Take a look at the trailer below: