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Being a Superhero Is Super Hard in the Trailer for Jupiter’s Legacy

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Published on April 7, 2021

Screenshot: Netflix
Screenshot: Netflix

Some trailers tease an intriguing narrative or premise, or introduce fascinating characters, and some spell everything out for you. The trailer for Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy—based on the comic by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Frank Quitely—is definitely the latter. It’s hard to be a superhero! People die! You don’t get enough credit sometimes!

And maybe it’s even harder to be a superhero’s kid, especially when your dad just flat-out tells you that you have to be “the ideal.”

This trailer isn’t doing a lot to stand out from the superhero pack, though it’s more brightly colored than many of its peers. But the action feels familiar and rote, the dialogue painfully on the nose. Starting with a mysterious island also has the unfortunate effect of making me think about Arrow, which had enough daddy issues to keep a person busy for a while. (Most of The CW’s superhero shows share this trait to some degree.) The story requires its first generation of superheroes to play older and younger versions of themselves, but the aged-up makeup and wigs aren’t quite what they should be.

Original showrunner Steven S. DeKnight is pretty well steeped in the superhero genre, having worked on everything from Angel to Smallville to Daredevil. When he left the production in 2019, midway through the first season, the reins passed to Sang Kyu Kim, a co-executive producer on Altered Carbon. We’ll see how the family drama plays out when Jupiter’s Legacy lands on Netflix on May 7th.


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Molly Templeton

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Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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