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15 Things You Didn’t Know About The Disappointing Superman Returns
In the annals of comic book movies, 2006’s Superman Returns holds a middling position. Although the film got mostly good reviews, few critics outright raved about it. Audiences turned out to the tune of a $200 million box office gross — a number that was respectable, yet far below what it was expected to earn. Fan reaction was decidedly mixed. Most people agreed it was generally okay. They also agreed that it nevertheless didn’t achieve what it could have. In other words, it was disappointing.
A big part of the problem was that director Bryan Singer intentionally made it look and feel like the original 1978 Superman movie. He even cast a lead actor, Brandon Routh, with an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve. Given that Christopher Nolan gave the Dark Knight an edgy, complex rebooting with Batman Begins the year before, Superman Returns felt embarrassingly old-fashioned in comparison.
Even if it didn’t satisfy audiences the way they expected, the behind-the-scenes story of the movie provides plenty of drama and thrills. From casting decisions, to on-set troubles, to one co-star’s weird method acting, the film’s production and release is a tale unto itself.
Here are 15 Things You Didn’t Know About The Disappointing Superman Returns.
15. WILL SMITH WAS OFFERED THE ROLE OF SUPERMAN
When Superman Returns got the green light from Warner Bros. Pictures, there was a lot of debate over who should play the Man of Steel.
The shoes of Christopher Reeve, who so memorably portrayed the character in the original series of movies, were hard to fill. Of course, Nicolas Cage was cast by director Tim Burton for a Superman movie that never came to fruition. That meant another search was needed.
Intriguingly, Will Smith claims that he was offered the lead role in Superman Returns.
He told MTV that he also turned the role down for a very specific reason. “I had already done Jim West [the character from his flop Wild Wild West], and you can’t be messing up white people’s heroes in Hollywood,” he said. “You mess up white people’s heroes in Hollywood, you’ll never work in this town again!”
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6. THE DIRECTOR REFUSED TO ALLOW TEST SCREENINGS
When a director completes his cut of a movie, there is a process it goes through. That “rough cut” is screened for test audiences so that the studio and filmmakers can get a sense of how it plays, what works, and what needs tweaking. Virtually all studio movies go through this routine, which can be humbling if the crowd doesn’t respond well.
Although studios rely heavily on the results of such test screenings, not every director trusts the process. Singer demanded that Warner Bros. allow him to bypass the audience feedback. Because of the success he’d had with the X-Men movies, he was able to get them to agree. Instead, Singer hosted what’s called a “friends and family screening.” This entailed showing Superman Returns to a small group of personal confidantes whose opinions he trusted.
Under their advice, he trimmed his cut by 15 minutes. It safe to sat that Singer would not get the same liberties today, having recently been fired from his job as director of Bohemian Rhapsody.
5. THE VIDEOGAME TIE-IN WAS BIZARRE
Videogames tied in to blockbuster movie releases are a normal part of the promotional cycle. Any semi-serious gamer knows that, more often than not, such games are slapped together to capitalize on a movie’s presumed success. They rarely offer any kind of remarkable gameplay.
Even by the low standards of movie tie-ins, the Superman Returnsgame was bad.
You’d think that it would have Superman saving Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, and taking on some of his most recognizable villains — or at least Lex Luthor, who actually appears in the film. Nope! While the flying levels were okay at best, levels set on the ground offered little to do besides rescue 200 kittens. Not once is the player required to rescue Clark Kent’s love interest.
Making matters worse, the final boss in the game is a tornado. That’s right, a tornado. Gaming critics understandably savaged it.
4. IT WAS ACCUSED OF BEING PROPAGANDA
Although it has a 75% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Superman Returns got its fair share of negative reviews. And even the critics who liked it admitted there were some substantial flaws. The person who may have disliked the film most of all wasn’t a critic, though, and his reason for disliking it wasn’t entirely based on its merits as a piece of entertainment.
A man named Dr. Haider Mahdi wrote a rather blistering, widely-shared essay on the movie, dubbing it propaganda. Among his assertions was that it was “a well-planned and well-administered dose of indoctrination into the American ideology of ‘demon-hunting,’ ‘external threats,’ the use of force, and the obsession with power.”
He didn’t stop there.
Mahdi additionally claimed Superman Returns “promotes [George W.] Bush’s agenda of aggression against a self-perceived evil world, which is out to destroy America and its values.”
3. QUENTIN TARANTINO IS A HUGE FAN
We all know Quentin Tarantino is a movie fan. We also know that his tastes are eclectic, to put it lightly. In particular, he enjoys old spaghetti Westerns and ’70s-era Blaxploitation flicks. Occasionally he weighs in on more recent releases, such as when he declared The Lone Ranger to be one of his top ten favorite films of 2013. He was also a passionate admirer of — you guessed it — Superman Returns.
Bryan Singer told the British publication Empire that he and Tarantino “had a big conversation about it” and that the Pulp Fiction director “has a fascination with this film.” When interviewed by the New York Times in 2009, Tarantino stated that “I am a big fan of Superman Returns. I’m working on what is now a 20-page review of that movie, and I’m not done yet.”
Sadly, although he loved the film, Tarantino never made his review public.
2. IT WAS THE FIRST MOVIE CONVERTED TO IMAX 3D
These days, “event” movies are routinely released in the IMAX format. Back in 2006, such a thing was much more rare. So was digital 3D projection, since it would be another three years before James Cameron’s Avatar properly kicked off the modern 3D craze. On these counts, Superman Returns was way ahead of the curve.
That’s because it was the first movie to be converted into IMAX 3D. Singer hand-picked several scenes from the film, which were then given the extra-dimensional treatment. He also came up with a signal to let audiences know when it was time to put their glasses on and when to take them off.
All in all, roughly twenty minutes of the movie were presented to IMAX patrons in 3D. The response was sufficiently positive that it paved the way for future releases.
1. ONE OF THE DELETED SCENES COST $10 MILLION
Most movies have deleted scenes. Some are just minor trims, and other times, sizable chunks are cut out.
Superman Returns has what may be the mother of all deleted scenes.
That’s because it runs almost six full minutes and cost a whopping $10 million to create. The sequence in question is an alternate opening to the film. In it, Kal-El boards a ship made of the same crystalline material found in the Fortress of Solitude. He returns to his home planet of Krypton. While surveying its remains, his ship sustains damage, forcing him to high-tail it back to Earth. The dark, ominous clip is scored only with the unusual sounds of his starcraft and a rapidly-pulsing heartbeat.
While visually impressive, the scene is clearly at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie. It was an expensive cut to make, but it had to go.
—
15 Things You Didn’t Know About The Disappointing Superman Returns
- By Mike McGranaghan
- 01.27.2018
- No Comments
In the annals of comic book movies, 2006’s Superman Returns holds a middling position. Although the film got mostly good reviews, few critics outright raved about it. Audiences turned out to the tune of a $200 million box office gross — a number that was respectable, yet far below what it was expected to earn. Fan reaction was decidedly mixed. Most people agreed it was generally okay. They also agreed that it nevertheless didn’t achieve what it could have. In other words, it was disappointing.
A big part of the problem was that director Bryan Singer intentionally made it look and feel like the original 1978 Superman movie. He even cast a lead actor, Brandon Routh, with an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve. Given that Christopher Nolan gave the Dark Knight an edgy, complex rebooting with Batman Begins the year before, Superman Returns felt embarrassingly old-fashioned in comparison.
Even if it didn’t satisfy audiences the way they expected, the behind-the-scenes story of the movie provides plenty of drama and thrills. From casting decisions, to on-set troubles, to one co-star’s weird method acting, the film’s production and release is a tale unto itself.
Here are 15 Things You Didn’t Know About The Disappointing Superman Returns.
15. WILL SMITH WAS OFFERED THE ROLE OF SUPERMAN
When Superman Returns got the green light from Warner Bros. Pictures, there was a lot of debate over who should play the Man of Steel.
The shoes of Christopher Reeve, who so memorably portrayed the character in the original series of movies, were hard to fill. Of course, Nicolas Cage was cast by director Tim Burton for a Superman movie that never came to fruition. That meant another search was needed.
Intriguingly, Will Smith claims that he was offered the lead role in Superman Returns.
He told MTV that he also turned the role down for a very specific reason. “I had already done Jim West [the character from his flop Wild Wild West], and you can’t be messing up white people’s heroes in Hollywood,” he said. “You mess up white people’s heroes in Hollywood, you’ll never work in this town again!”
15 TV Shows That Destroyed Themselves By Firing Actors
6. THE DIRECTOR REFUSED TO ALLOW TEST SCREENINGS
When a director completes his cut of a movie, there is a process it goes through. That “rough cut” is screened for test audiences so that the studio and filmmakers can get a sense of how it plays, what works, and what needs tweaking. Virtually all studio movies go through this routine, which can be humbling if the crowd doesn’t respond well.
Although studios rely heavily on the results of such test screenings, not every director trusts the process. Singer demanded that Warner Bros. allow him to bypass the audience feedback. Because of the success he’d had with the X-Men movies, he was able to get them to agree. Instead, Singer hosted what’s called a “friends and family screening.” This entailed showing Superman Returns to a small group of personal confidantes whose opinions he trusted.
Under their advice, he trimmed his cut by 15 minutes. It safe to sat that Singer would not get the same liberties today, having recently been fired from his job as director of Bohemian Rhapsody.
5. THE VIDEOGAME TIE-IN WAS BIZARRE
Videogames tied in to blockbuster movie releases are a normal part of the promotional cycle. Any semi-serious gamer knows that, more often than not, such games are slapped together to capitalize on a movie’s presumed success. They rarely offer any kind of remarkable gameplay.
Even by the low standards of movie tie-ins, the Superman Returnsgame was bad.
You’d think that it would have Superman saving Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, and taking on some of his most recognizable villains — or at least Lex Luthor, who actually appears in the film. Nope! While the flying levels were okay at best, levels set on the ground offered little to do besides rescue 200 kittens. Not once is the player required to rescue Clark Kent’s love interest.
Making matters worse, the final boss in the game is a tornado. That’s right, a tornado. Gaming critics understandably savaged it.
4. IT WAS ACCUSED OF BEING PROPAGANDA
Although it has a 75% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Superman Returns got its fair share of negative reviews. And even the critics who liked it admitted there were some substantial flaws. The person who may have disliked the film most of all wasn’t a critic, though, and his reason for disliking it wasn’t entirely based on its merits as a piece of entertainment.
A man named Dr. Haider Mahdi wrote a rather blistering, widely-shared essay on the movie, dubbing it propaganda. Among his assertions was that it was “a well-planned and well-administered dose of indoctrination into the American ideology of ‘demon-hunting,’ ‘external threats,’ the use of force, and the obsession with power.”
He didn’t stop there.
Mahdi additionally claimed Superman Returns “promotes [George W.] Bush’s agenda of aggression against a self-perceived evil world, which is out to destroy America and its values.”
3. QUENTIN TARANTINO IS A HUGE FAN
We all know Quentin Tarantino is a movie fan. We also know that his tastes are eclectic, to put it lightly. In particular, he enjoys old spaghetti Westerns and ’70s-era Blaxploitation flicks. Occasionally he weighs in on more recent releases, such as when he declared The Lone Ranger to be one of his top ten favorite films of 2013. He was also a passionate admirer of — you guessed it — Superman Returns.
Bryan Singer told the British publication Empire that he and Tarantino “had a big conversation about it” and that the Pulp Fiction director “has a fascination with this film.” When interviewed by the New York Times in 2009, Tarantino stated that “I am a big fan of Superman Returns. I’m working on what is now a 20-page review of that movie, and I’m not done yet.”
Sadly, although he loved the film, Tarantino never made his review public.
2. IT WAS THE FIRST MOVIE CONVERTED TO IMAX 3D
These days, “event” movies are routinely released in the IMAX format. Back in 2006, such a thing was much more rare. So was digital 3D projection, since it would be another three years before James Cameron’s Avatar properly kicked off the modern 3D craze. On these counts, Superman Returns was way ahead of the curve.
That’s because it was the first movie to be converted into IMAX 3D. Singer hand-picked several scenes from the film, which were then given the extra-dimensional treatment. He also came up with a signal to let audiences know when it was time to put their glasses on and when to take them off.
All in all, roughly twenty minutes of the movie were presented to IMAX patrons in 3D. The response was sufficiently positive that it paved the way for future releases.
1. ONE OF THE DELETED SCENES COST $10 MILLION
Most movies have deleted scenes. Some are just minor trims, and other times, sizable chunks are cut out.
Superman Returns has what may be the mother of all deleted scenes.
That’s because it runs almost six full minutes and cost a whopping $10 million to create. The sequence in question is an alternate opening to the film. In it, Kal-El boards a ship made of the same crystalline material found in the Fortress of Solitude. He returns to his home planet of Krypton. While surveying its remains, his ship sustains damage, forcing him to high-tail it back to Earth. The dark, ominous clip is scored only with the unusual sounds of his starcraft and a rapidly-pulsing heartbeat.
While visually impressive, the scene is clearly at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie. It was an expensive cut to make, but it had to go.
—
