Just a year ago, David Corenswet was probably not a name you’d ever heard. But now that the actor has taken on the role of Clark Kent in director James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, you’ve probably come across him quite a bit. After an ominous end to the DC Extended Universe and an equally ominous end to Henry Cavill’s run as the Man of Steel, Gunn announced that the first film from the newly formed DC Studios would be his Superman film, starring none other than Corenswet.

This will undoubtedly be Corenswet’s breakout role. Before being cast in the first DC studio production, the Juilliard graduate had played significant roles in several high-profile films and television shows, from the projectionist in Ti West’s A24 horror film “Pearl” to up-and-coming actor Jack Castello in Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” on Netflix. He even popped up in David Simon’s criminally underrated HBO series “We Own This City,” playing drug agent David McDougall. But none of those roles propelled Corenswet into mainstream superstardom the way Gunn’s “Superman” will.

Earlier this year, we got to see Corenswet officially in the Superman costume for the first time, when an image was released that also featured one of the biggest stars in all of Hollywood history: a giant sky laser. But before Corenswet becomes a household name, let’s take a look back at his career so far and remember the path he’s taken to get here. Luckily, Rotten Tomatoes offers rankings of the actor’s work, which also gives us an excuse to talk about Corenswet’s highest-rated film.

While we all wait for Superman, 2024 has given us our David Corenswet fix in the form of Ned Benson’s romantic dramedy The Greatest Hits and Apple’s miniseries Lady in the Lake – both of which feature the actor in supporting roles. We also saw Corenswet in Twisters, a film that obviously included a small reference to his Superman portrayal. As director Lee Isaac Chung recalled, after Corenswet auditioned for Clark Kent during the filming of Twisters, he brought a bit of Superman with him to the set.

But before he was chasing tornadoes and trying to play the savior of the beleaguered DC film universe in the sequels, Corenswet had a small role in the A24 horror film “Pearl,” in which he starred alongside a delightfully wacky Mia Goth. In her review for /Film, Lex Briscuso called the second installment in Ti West’s “X” trilogy “an ambitious and bold work of horror that questions what it means to deserve love and the bad things we sometimes do to get it.” There’s no doubt that the star of this 2022 sequel was Goth, but according to a Rotten Tomatoes ranking, “Pearl” is also the highest-rated project in Corenswet’s filmography.

The film currently has a rating of 92%, making it the second highest-rated film of West’s trilogy, just behind “X” at 94%. However, for Corenswet, this is the best Tomatometer rating yet.

Where to start on Rotten Tomatoes? Having written about the site’s shortcomings many times before, I don’t know what to say about this latest assessment of an actor’s work. This site claims that there are only two perfect war films in the history of cinema, and that Sean Connery’s best film is “Darby O’Gill and the Little People.” But maybe you agree that no war film has yet surpassed “The Fireflies” or “One Man Escaped,” and maybe you like Connery’s Disney debut. Well, let’s take a closer look at “Pearl” and its RT rating.

That 92% apparently equates to an average rating of 7.9 out of 10. Why? Because 7.9 is the actual average rating critics gave this film. 92% just means that 92% of the reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes were “positive.” But as anyone familiar with the inner workings of the great Tomato building knows, the word “positive” is elusive in this context. Often, RT aggregators have to make a decision about whether some reviews are, as the site puts it, “mixed-positive or mixed-negative.”

Looking at David Corenswet’s filmography on RT, Pearl is easily the highest-rated film on the list. But there are sure to be many more well-reviewed projects to come as his career progresses, and from what we know, this RT ranking won’t mean much if several of them are vying for the top spot. Who knows, maybe Superman will come along and blow Pearl out of the water — which would at least mean that Corenswet’s highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes would be one in which he was the star.