Can you believe that Superman Returns is 20 years old? How? How in the name of God was all that 20 years ago?
Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns is still a topic of discussion among movie fans today. Something about it just didn’t quite work.
Recently, the film’s editor and composer John Ottman spoke with Half the Picture (as reported at Dark Horizons) and was quite refreshingly blunt with what he saw as the issues:
“I think that’s one of the problems with Superman Returns is that we were so trying to be so reverential to the ’78 version. It was crippled to go in a new direction. At the same time, I like that fact that it it stayed true to the feeling that Superman should have. He should be a very positive, good force.
When those dark ones that came later, I was like, what is this garbage, you know? Um, and so not that ours was great, it’s like ours was very flawed as well. It was a beautiful film. I think it was beautifully done. I just think the plot by Lex Luthor was derivative of before.”
He ran through a whole list, including how Parker Posey’s character “had nothing to do…she just sits around looking depressed with her little dog”. He also says they got Lois Lane wrong:
I thought Kate Bosworth was fantastic, but she was miscast. I thought that Lois Lane, not that everyone has to be Margot Kidder, we needed her to be more endearing.
We need to laugh with her one at least once or something, and she was so ‘hard-hitting reporter with a Pulitzer’ at like, what 12? You know I just didn’t I didn’t buy it.
The funny thing is we were so concerned about [whether] Brandon pulled it off, [but] the whole time it was really her character that was the problem I think.
Not that she was bad, she was excellent in the film [and] she’s a really good actress, it’s just I felt she was miscast or she was miswritten or something. It wasn’t her fault.
So all along it really wasn’t Brandon that shouldn’t have been the worry of ours, it was that role, I think. I think they would have had a more fun relationship. Had should be a little more endearing in a way.”
The final cost was $204 million n 2006 dollars, and made $391.1 million worldwide. Warner’s, as is traditional, panicked and reached for the big reboot lever. In the shadow of Batman Begins, they were only going one way.
