The new Superman reboot depicts Metropolis as located in Delaware, with visual cues including Delaware license plates and a visible state flag. The movie briefly updates the city's street grid while reinforcing a flexible, long-standing depiction of Metropolis's location. Earlier screen portrayals connected Metropolis stylistically to New York or Chicago, while DC Comics has historically dropped hints linking the city to Delaware Bay. Fictional cities resist precise mapping, and Metropolis is best understood as a major Northeastern U.S. metropolis situated near the fictional Gotham within shared DC geography.
Why Delaware? It's a return to tradition, of sorts. Over the decades, the DC Universe has dropped various hints that Metropolis is adjacent to Delaware Bay. But the movie does even more to please the fans of fictional geography: It offers an updated look at the city's grid - again, for a tantalizingly brief moment. The exact location of Metropolis doesn't bear scrutiny. By definition, fictional places have a tenuous relationship to real geography: a general area is required, a precise place is impossible.
This year's Superman reboot places Metropolis, the caped superhero's hometown, firmly in the First State - if your eye is quick enough to catch a couple of hints. New York, Chicago...Delaware? A short close-up of Lois Lane's car shows it sporting Delaware license plates. And at another point in the movie, Clark Kent walks past a Delaware flag, easily recognizable for its yellow diamond on a blue field.
Metropolis, with its much longer history, has a surprisingly circuitous geography. The definition that fits most of the city's manifestations throughout nearly a century of comic books, TV series, and movies is that it is a major city in the Northeastern U.S., close to that other fictional megacity, Gotham, the home of Batman. In that standard incarnation, both places are clearly inspired by, though not entire
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