David Corenswet as Superman is limping DC Studios’ last chance

When David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan were revealed as DC’s new Superman and Lois Lane on Tuesday, it was hard to get revved up about the news.

That’s not to diss the casting for 2025’s “Superman: Legacy.”

Corenswet, the 29-year-old freshly minted Clark Kent, appropriately looks like a younger version of his predecessor Henry Cavill and was charismatic on the Netflix series “Hollywood” and “The Politician.” 

And 32-year-old Brosnahan, the lovable star of Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” is ideal as his Daily Planet counterpart.

I’m sure they’ll do fine.

But the casting change-up didn’t come across as a major victory for Warner Bros. and DC Studios so much as a last-ditch effort in their losing battle to stay airborne.

Is this Metropolis welcome party too little, too late? 

After all, the DC Extended Universe — an interconnected franchise of mostly horrible superhero films featuring characters such as Wonder Woman, Batman and Aquaman — is close to unsalvageable.

Both critics and audiences have viciously turned against it, and public demand for dreary new chapters is negligible. 

Since 2018, the DCEU has been a veritable flop factory.

“The Flash,” released two weeks ago, was supposed to reverse the studio’s fortunes. Instead, the Ezra Miller-led film is an even bigger bomb than anybody expected. 

Before “Flash” crashed, “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” “Black Adam,” “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Birds of Prey” and “Shazam!” all tanked at the box office (a couple premiered on HBO Max), too. 

Earlier entries such as “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” made a buck, sure, but were dismally reviewed.

A 10-year-old project to compete with rival Marvel, DC should stand for Decadelong Calamity.

With that in mind, new studio heads James Gunn (director of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy) and Peter Safran have been tasked with taking a weed whacker to the unwieldy DC, which is beset by dark, competing visions and one-off experiments.

What’s awkward is that the scattered weeds just so happen to be the hits!

“Joker,” which starred the Oscar-winning Joaquin Phoenix, and “The Batman” with Robert Pattinson performed extremely well at the box office and energized the fan base. Too bad they have zero connection to the DCEU — meaning that they confoundedly exist in their own totally separate stories.

It’s the main universe, the meat and potatoes, that’s stuck in Bizarro World. Can a caped Corenswet rescue it?

His “Superman” will be flying into a storm.

Gunn and Safran are attempting to course-correct just as audiences appear to be losing their appetite for vast, confusing, entwined comic book worlds. Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” for instance, grossed just $476 million worldwide.

Marvel is no longer the behemoth that it was pre-pandemic either, but thanks to its head start and relative consistency, it will remain the Coke to DC’s RC Cola.

Still to come this year for DC are “Blue Beetle” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” both of which were filmed prior to the studio’s reorganization and will therefore be greeted with some indifference.   

And then in 2025, “Superman: Legacy” will kick off a brand new era of at least five related DC movies and five TV shows. 

The whole renovation sounds exhausting and fruitless to me. Of course, you can’t blame Warner Bros. for wanting to plunder every centimeter of valuable intellectual property. 

But the sobering reality is that not one of the 14 DC Extended Universe films released so far has been even half as good as Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy that ended in 2012 and grossed nearly $2.5 billion at the worldwide box office.

There’s a lesson here. How about instead of announcing a vast slate of meticulously plotted movies presented in pointless phases (the first will be “Gods and Monsters”) that will inevitably drain hundreds of millions of dollars from WB, you make one big, well-thought-out hit?

Foolish ambition could prove to be DC Studios’ Kryptonite.