“That was really unfortunate,” Gunn continued. “So Peter and I [thought] the right thing to do was to sit down with [Cavill] and talk to him. And we sat down and we talked to him. He was an absolute gentleman, a great guy about it. He said, ‘The only thing I ask is that I’m able to reveal it myself as opposed to it coming from you guys.'”

"He was an absolute gentleman about it. He said, ‘The only thing I ask is that I'm able to reveal it myself as opposed to it coming from you guys,'" the director added of Cavill's reaction to the news.

Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel deserves a lot of credit. The Christopher Reeve Superman movies had become such cultural icons for the character that the one time prior to Man of Steel that anybody tried to make a new Superman movie, they just tried to make a Christopher Reeve movie with different actors.