A teaser and a toupée: 'Forelock' bets that Superman's curl still sells

A two-line teaser for an indie comedy called Forelock has surfaced on Letterboxd, where viewers can preview the short before its wider release, and the joke is already doing the heavy lifting. The clip, logged on 2026-07-13, opens on actor David Krumholtz delivering the line, "Don't worry, they're going to eat him up!" The hair in question is not his. The hair is a gravity-defying black curl perched on the brow of a Superman-type figure, and the film appears to treat the toupée as the protagonist's defining vulnerability.

What we have here is a low-budget short film leaning, with apparent confidence, into the single most mocked feature of DC's flagship superhero. The premise is the inverse of the usual superhero send-up: instead of mocking the godlike, the short mocks the maintenance required to look godlike in the first place. The pitch is not that Superman is powerful. The pitch is that Superman's hair is.

A Letterboxd preview, not a premiere

The film's first public window is a Letterboxd preview, an unusual staging choice for an indie short and one that signals a deliberately small audience. Letterboxd, the film-discovery platform owned by a subsidiary of the wider social-media conglomerate that also operates Tumblr and Mastodon, has spent the last several years positioning itself as an early-stop distribution channel for festival-circuit and micro-budget titles. A short using that lane as its debut implies the filmmakers have prioritised the cinephile core over a general audience, at least in this opening move.

The teaser itself is less than a minute. Krumholtz's line lands as the marketing summary. The premise reads visually: a Superman-coded figure, a curl that behaves like a separate character, and a small circle of onlookers treating the hair with the seriousness usually reserved for the man beneath it.

The joke the wider culture already knows

Superman's hair has been a punchline for at least four decades. The 1980 Christopher Reeve vehicle Superman II, the 1995 syndicated Lois & Clark run, and the more recent Peacemaker television cycle all turned the curl into a recurring visual gag. The post-2025 Superman feature from James Gunn, arriving in a release cycle that the wider trade press has covered extensively, re-centred the curl as a hero's signature rather than a punchline. A short film releasing into that environment has a clear reference point and a clear counter-position: the hair is heroic, the hair is heroic only because of effort, and the effort is the comedy.

Krumholtz, best known to wider audiences through his run on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory and his role in the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, has spent the last several years working across indie features and short-form streaming originals. Casting him as the voice selling the protagonist to a crowd reads as a deliberate signal that this is a comedy about belief, not a parody of the superhero figure himself.

The structural bet

Short films increasingly live or die on Letterboxd-list traction. A preview window on the platform, with a watchlist-count climb during the first seventy-two hours, is the closest thing the indie short circuit has to an opening-weekend box-office figure. Forelock is making that bet. The film asks the cinephile-precis audience, the cohort that rates everything from Yasujirō Ozu to the latest A24 horror release on the same four-star scale, to treat a Superman-hair gag as worthy of a four-minute sit.

The risk is that the joke is a single line deep. The opportunity is that the cinephile audience has spent two years consuming long-form video essays unpacking the exact comic-book signifier the short is mocking. The short's structural position is essentially: it is a one-joke film made for an audience that has been primed to find that one joke extremely productive.

Stakes, in the smallest possible frame

The actual stakes here are modest. Forelock is a micro-budget short with no reported distribution deal beyond the Letterboxd preview. If the watchlist numbers hold, the film earns a slot at a regional festival circuit; if they do not, it lives as a curio on the platform and moves on. What is worth watching is whether Letterboxd previews become a viable alternative to festival debuts for shorts of this register. The teaser gives us one small data point in what may become a longer pattern: a film pitched first to the algorithmic cinephile audience, with a star turn built around a single line and a single visual gag, and an opening distribution lane that did not exist five years ago.

The bigger question is the one Krumholtz's character is, in effect, answering in the teaser. The Superman-coded figure is being sold to a room. The room, the short promises, is buying. The curl, it turns out, is the pitch.

Monexus framed this as a distribution-form story first, a comic-book-property story second. The wire coverage of indie shorts tends to skip the Letterboxd-preview mechanism entirely; the more useful angle is the platform as a small but real release lane.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/s/firstshowing/