Cleveland Guardians Announce "Superman Night" In the Stadium Where the Movie Filmed Major Scene
Major League Baseball's Cleveland Guardians have announced Superman Night in the Park, an event which will celebrate the release of James Gunn's Superman in July.
Superman – billed in the Guardians' press release as DC's Superman – is set to release in theaters on July 11th. The movie, which was shot partially in Cleveland, includes a fight scene filmed at Progressive Field, where the Guardians play. You can see bits of it in the trailer.
The Guardians will square off against the Baltimore Orioles ("It's a bird...!") at 6:40 p.m. at Cleveland's Progressive Field that night. The first 15,000 fans to attend will get a Metropolis Meteors t-shirt. The fictional team's logo and color scheme were pretty clearly modeled on that of the Cleveland Guardians – likely as a practical matter, to make painting out any signs of the real-world team easier in post-production.
Tickets to the game start at just $20 for standing room only in the bar, or $23 in the upper bleachers. Theme Night tickets, which will entitle you to a Superman bobblehead, start at $37.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman in the 1930s, hailed from Cleveland. Siegel's home was actually fixed up and transformed into a local landmark after funds were raised by a number of pop culture and comics luminaries, including best-selling author Brad Meltzer whose novel Book of Lies touched on the death of Siegel's father.
Superman, written and directed by Gunn, stars David Corenswet in the title role and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. A number of DC heroes and villains are set to debut in the movie, which marks the first live-action outing for Gunn's rejuvenated DC Universe. The movie also stars Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner (a role he will reprise on HBO's Lanterns), María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor.
Little is known yet about the plot of Superman, with promotional material so far focusing on a small number of scenes and an overall vibe of spectacle and wonder. So far, Warner's biggest selling point appears to be Krypto the Super-Dog, who has appeared in virtually every piece of promotional material.
There is, of course, a little humor in the fact that the Cleveland ball club is known as the "Guardians." It's a team whose fan-made merchandise has periodically riffed on the logos of Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Does the re-styled Meteors logo technically count as a "Guardians Easter egg" for trivia nerds?
