Superman’s Hall of Justice is still under construction when Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) arrives to confront the “Justice Gang,” a trio of corporate-sponsored heroes whose mercenary tendencies clash with Superman’s indiscriminate altruism. Workers are still placing letters on the art deco facade; the building’s marbled inner rotunda is an impressive space that its residents haven’t grown into.
The characters perch on tiny mod furniture, dwarfed by the murals overhead, and tell Lois they won’t be helping her rescue Superman from archnemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).
They probably could. They won’t.
It’s a low point in the narrative, which challenges its central characters to fly against gale-force headwinds of caution and cynicism at every turn. But everyone in Union Terminal’s Omnimax theater on Tuesday night cheered the moment Lois pulled up outside.
The Hall of Justice scenes in the summer’s most anticipated blockbuster were shot yards away from the theater doors, in the rotunda and long driveway familiar to every Tri-Stater who’s ever taken a grade-school field trip.
Although Superman’s official release isn’t until Friday, Union Terminal’s significance — in this film and superhero history — prompted DC Studios to host a special early screening for a small group of in-the-know fans on Tuesday night. Attendees mingled with Kryptonite-green cocktails in their hands, then filed into the Omnimax, took their seats and obeyed the instruction of the film’s months-long marketing campaign: Look up.
Ohio and the history of heroism
This Hall of Justice’s live-action film debut was a long time coming. Superman has deep roots in Ohio, and Cincinnati’s most recognizable landmark is better known as the Justice League’s headquarters than the railway station, mall or museum most Cincinnatians have actually visited.
Union Terminal first opened its doors in 1933, the same year Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster hunched over their notebooks at Cleveland’s Glenville High School to plan a series of stories about a man who could “hurdle a twenty-story building, raise tremendous weights [and] run faster than an express train.”
The character debuted in 1938’s Action Comics #1 with only a few of his signature powers and little backstory — but he was already, as Siegel wrote in that first issue, “champion of the oppressed, a physical marvel who [has] sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!”
Union Terminal had been similarly feted at its own opening. If Superman was the Man of Tomorrow, the train station was a “gateway to a new destiny” for all Cincinnatians of the mid-century. In a rapturous front-page feature published May 31, 1933, the Enquirer’s editorial board promised:
“You will be awed by beauty of art and architecture. … Today, in the midst of music and banners and civic celebration, in the visualization of a wonderful dream come true, Cincinnatians may look with pride upon the establishment of the gateway to a new destiny for the city.”
The two Ohio-native figures would finally become part of the same story forty years later, when a background artist on Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends modeled the team’s headquarters on the by-then-obsolete train station.
Following the success of Super Friends, Union Terminal — often sitting empty or under construction in real life — continued to “play” the Hall of Justice in 52 years of subsequent cartoons, comics and video games.
Writer-director James Gunn, a superhero-film veteran best known for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and DC’s ultraviolent The Suicide Squad, brought his live-action Superman production to Ohio in the summer of 2024. Gunn shot Hall of Justice scenes in Cincinnati and outdoor action in Cleveland, which now stands in for Superman’s adopted home of Metropolis.
Whatever happened to the world of tomorrow?
Superman and Union Terminal are both symbols of ‘30s-era futurism planted against modern skylines. They’re products of unfashionable earnestness and dated artistic movements; their proprietors, whether DC Comics or the City of Cincinnati, sometimes spend decades fumbling for a way to make them exciting again.
He’s a mild-mannered reporter. He’s in love with Lois. He’s dead. He’s undead. He’s got a mullet and an attitude problem. He’s raising his own clone as a son. He’s Brandon Routh. He’s Henry Cavill.
It’s a train station. It’s a mall. It’s a museum. It’s a train station again. Barbie’s here.
The exuberant, winsome Superman screened for Cincinnatians on Tuesday challenges audiences to accept an old-fashioned hero — and the old-fashioned hope he represents — without irony, caveat or condescension. Members of the Justice Gang snark and pose for superheroic photo ops after each rescue; Lex Luthor’s deep cynicism enables him to justify international atrocities as good for humanity; and Superman is exactly the big, blue boy scout first sketched by Shuster and Siegel in 1933.
He saves dogs and squirrels from danger. He befriends someone ordered to keep him in interdimensional prison. Regular people risk their lives to pick him back up after a supervillain slams him into an eight-foot crater in downtown Metropolis.
And all of that, Superman argues, is much harder than not caring at all.
There aren’t many places better than Union Terminal to watch a movie about retro futures and the hard work of imagining something better.
But your local theater will do just fine.
Superman opens nationwide on July 11.
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Superfan fact: Although Superman marks Union Terminal’s onscreen debut as the Hall of Justice, this isn’t its first appearance in a DC superhero film. The building’s facade appeared 30 years ago in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, which starred Val Kilmer as the title character and Chris O’Donnell as Robin.
In the film, the familiar-looking Gotham City Hippodrome hosts a charity circus and becomes the site of Robin’s traumatic orphaning, prompting Batman to adopt him as ward and sidekick.
It’s hard to say which decision is stranger: Casting then-25-year-old O’Donnell as 36-year-old Kilmer’s adopted child or inviting the circus to a city with a killer clown problem. Have a little class, Gotham Arts Association.
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This article appears in Jul 9-22, 2025.