Thirteen years later, the Pa Kent tornado scene from Man of Steel still starts fights.
Posting in Spanish, X user El Gato de Ozymandias shared the GIF of Kevin Costner’s Jonathan Kent holding up his hand and wrote, “More than a decade later and there are still people who didn’t understand this scene from Man of Steel.”
The post is closing in on 33,000 views with nearly 100 replies at the time of this writing, and the replies are the same argument fans have been having since 2013.
I’ve had my own problem with the scene. Argue however you want, he’s your dad, and I never could see Superman not saving his dad (he’s always Superman!).
Dean Cain agrees. “I would have saved him,” the Lois & Clark star said at New York Comic-Con back in 2018.
But back at Comic-Con 2023, DC insiders close to Zack Snyder’s people told me the scene was never meant to stand on its own. There was a payoff coming.
The Payoff Was Supergirl
As I exclusively reported at the time, Snyder planned for the Pa Kent death to connect through Supergirl, and that thread actually made it into The Flash.
Jonathan Kent’s fear in Man of Steel is simple. The world isn’t ready, and he’s afraid of what happens to a young Clark who exposes himself.
The Flash shows exactly that. Supergirl is captured by the Russians, depowered, and experimented on.
I’m told that was the point. What Pa Kent feared for Clark is what happened to Kara. He was right.
It was supposed to carry through the real ending of The Flash, too, where Kara spends the movie believing her baby cousin is dead until Barry fixes the Multiverse and Henry Cavill’s Superman is standing next to her.
We never got that version.
Snyder’s plan ran across multiple movies, with setups in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman built to pay off later.
Why It’s Blowing Up Again Now
The timing isn’t a coincidence.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan just confirmed on the record that Snyder’s Flashpoint Batman plans were real, backing up the other half of that same 2023 report: Snyder cast Morgan and Lauren Cohan in BvS with Flashpoint in mind.
Snyder got a hero’s welcome back at Warner Bros. from De Luca and Abdy.
He wants Cavill as Superman in The Dark Knight Returns. And our sources now treat Cavill’s DC return as a scheduling question, not an if.
Nothing moves until the Paramount-WBD merger does. But the setups Snyder planted in 2013 are suddenly live again.
So when fans say people still don’t understand that scene, understand this: Snyder built Man of Steel around payoffs he never got to deliver.
Thirteen years later, Pa Kent’s hand is still up. This time, the payoff might actually be coming.
