DC's Cooking Up a Live-Action Superman Prequel Series

Everyone knows you're not allowed to play with the two best toys in the DC Comics box -- Batman and Superman -- unless you're planning to blow a few hundred million dollars on a major motion picture. Batman and Superman prequels, however? Totally fair game.

Metropolis, a prequel story about the city before Superman's arrival, has been given a straight-to-series order from DC for its upcoming digital streaming service, with the show due out in 2019. Can you imagine what that city looked like before they had an all-powerful alien protecting it from the weekly super villain attacks, plane crashes and meteor strikes? Yeesh.

John Stephens and Danny Cannon, who work on Fox's Batman prequel series Gotham, will write and direct the series. According to the press release, Metropolis will focus on Lex Luthor and Lois Lane as they "investigate the world of fringe science and expose the city's dark and bizarre secrets." So there's a chance we won't see Superman at all, unlike Gotham, which is clearly working its way toward giving us Batman.

DC's streaming service is due out later this year and has a few series already planned, including the live-action version of Titans and animated series Young Justice: Outsiders and Harley Quinn.