Poor Superman. His last movie was a disappointment, and now his DC Comics stablemate Batman is getting all the box office glory. But Warner Bros. has a plan, according to the Wall Street Journal, to reboot the Superman franchise, and its DC superhero properties in general. That plan, in a nutshell: Do what Marvel does. (After all, Marvel didn’t wait around too long to go back to the drawing board with a Hulk reboot.) The two prongs of the plan: First, make a bunch of related movies about individual DC heroes (including Green Arrow, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Wonder Woman), then tie them together with a group tale (the sidelined Justice League of America movie), à la Marvel’s Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Avengers. Second, make the characters all psychologically darker (like Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Spider-Man, etc., but more importantly, like Warners’ own Batman, as Christian Bale has portrayed him, to great box office success).
Derivative as it is, this is not a bad plan, but can it work for Superman? The Man of Steel is not usually thought of as a brooding, tormented character, but there’s certainly room in his mythology for him to be portrayed that way. David Mamet wrote an essay about 20 years ago emphasizing Superman’s history of psychological damage. He’s an orphan who never knew his real parents or even his birthplace; he loves a woman he can’t really have, everyone he’s close to is consequently a target for his enemies; he’s an immigrant who remains a freak who’ll never be able to fully assimilate (and who finds refuge in the remotest place on Earth); and the only thing that can kill him is literal fragments of his past. Plus, his human disguise — as weak, awkward, clumsy, ineffectual professional bystander Clark Kent — suggests he doesn’t hold humanity in high regard.
Still, do moviegoers even want a dark Superman? We do like our superheroes bleak these days — not just Dark Knight and the Marvel characters, but also Hancock and the forthcoming Watchmen. And we’ve certainly seen Clark himself display plenty of teen angst on Smallville. But moviegoers have almost always gotten a Superman who’s a big blue Boy Scout. There’s certain to be outrage from some quarters if Superman is portrayed as something other than the untroubled, apple-pie defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But I wouldn’t worry; he’s a pretty strong guy. If he bounced back from Superman IV and Superman Returns, he’ll survive this, too.
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I wouldn’t watch a dark, brooding Superman… well, maybe I would if it was done right.
Superman Returns might have been a better film if it wasn’t a complete rip off of the original Superman movie from 1978, and if they didn’t cast Kate Bosworth.
And I don’t remember Iron Man being dark and brooding. RDJ actually made him kind of sarcastic and funny, as I recall……
If Warner Bros. was smart, they’d get some of the team that worked on the DC “animated universe” (“Batman: The Animated Series,” “Superman” The Animated Series,” “Justice League,” etc.) to develop scripts for the live action features.
Those shows were hardly straight kid-stuff, but had a grown-up appeal as well. More importantly, they perfectly captured the right tone for each character.
Watch some reruns of “Justice League Unlimited” on Boomerang and tell me I’m wrong. It’s not hard to imagine taking some of those story lines and padding them into a feature.
Not to mention, Brandon Routh looks like a boy scout, too, not all dark and mysterious…. I don’t think I can see him as the brooding type (I don’t think he has the acting range)………????
This is such a stupid idea. Try making a great Superman movie first. Get a better Superman and Lois. A villain that Superman could actually have a fight with. Brainiac. Doomsday. Darkseid. No Luthor. No kid.
Fact of the matter is that television writers are just plain better than movie writers these days. Will that ever switch back? Who knows! But, honestly, there isn’t a Superman movie they can do right that will beat what they’ve done on “Smallville”.
WB is proving, once again, that they have absolutely no idea how to handle their superhero properties (they got lucky with Chris Nolan). The Dark Knight was successful because it was dark… it was successful because the filmmakers found the tone that best suited a Batman story. For WB to watch Dark Knight and conculde that “people want dark superhero movies” would be like if they watched Titanic and conclude “people want to see movies about sinking boats”…. totally misses the point.
A Superman movie needs to find the tone that’s right for that character… not usurp Batman’s tone. It won’t work anyway. Oh well, those of us who have been waiting for another tolerable Superman flick since Superman 2 will just have to wait longer I guess.
Doh…. typo fix… that should have read “The Dark Knight wasN’T successful because it was dark….”
Doh…. typo fix… that should have read “The Dark Knight wasN’T successful because it was dark….”
Agree with the sentiment here… going “dark” like Batman is a bad idea. And I personally would like to see Superman go the opposite of TDK in terms of “realism”. I don’t want another movie where puny human Luthor is villain. I want aliens and someone who can go toe to toe. WB got lucky with TDK and looks like they don’t know what else to do.
But wait, WB is part of Time Warner, which owns Entertainment Weekly…ugh, go WB!
That last Superman movie was about as exciting as a wax museum. If anyone wants to make a new Superman movie, please make a NEW movie, not just a clumsy rehash of the Christopher Reeve version. And please cast someone who can act – not the mannequin from the last movie. If a “dark” Superman is more interesting, then go for it. Smallville certainly gets pretty dark. The teenage Clark was all about teen angst for the first few seasons, but you could definitely describe him as a brooding, tormented character for the past few seasons. I think Superman has meant different things to different generations, depending on the state of the wolrld at the time. Today’s audiences expect Superman to be more than a handsome Man of Steel with a heart of gold. Now I’m curious: where can we read David Mamet’s essay?
I guess I’m in the minority, but I absolutely loved Superman Returns. Sure it had some problems including Kate Bosworth and the kid, but the effects were fantastic. I also like all the little homages to the first movie.
I agree that going darker is not the answer. It doesn’t need to get psycholgical, it needs to get bigger. This is the most powerful superhero ever. He needs to battle something more than a real estate scam. He needs big villains. And don’t go to Smallville for advice. I watch the show, and it was good in the beginning, but it’s kind of sucked the past couple seasons.
Just like it happened in the comics .. “The Dark Knight” and “Watchmen” movies will usher in a new wave of darker, brooding takes on old characters. They’re even developing a Venom solo movie — the Venom solo comic and other failed attempts to shoehorn the slobbering, brain-eating dark side of Spider-Man in as an antihero in the comics was one of the targets of the inevitable backlash against the dark-and-gritty movement in comics.
Here’s hoping the Superman reboot doesn’t wear a mullet and black spandex.
Also, SUPERMAN RETURNS was a fantastic looking movie, and Brandon Routh did a fine job playing the character. It was the plot that stunk. The kid, Lois’s other man, Superman “off planet” for half a decade, Lex Luthor’s kryptonie island … that somehow doesn’t hurt Superman when he’s under it flying it into space. Ugh.
Pretty though. And really, a perfect example of why dark and gritty Superman doesn’t work.
Actually, that’s not a bad idea. But please get a great casting director this time around. No whats-his-name soap actor and no Kate Bosworth. And no kid. I think some angst might work well with that franchise, I’m interested to read Mamet’s essay.
I have to disagree with several of you here, and I’m sorry about that. I think “Smallville” has only gotten better. Once they got out of highschool, it became less like a teen-drama.
And Lex, how can you hate Lex? The interaction between Lex and Clark is THE key element of the show. I don’t know how it’s going to go without Lex, but I’ve enjoyed the show since the beginning.
If “Sex and the City”, “The X-files”, and “Friends” can get to the big screen, why not just transfer the “Smallville” cast into the new Superman movie? Even if they stray from the show’s details and get back to the premise of the original story, I think it would still work.
Superman Returns, minus Kate Bosworth (horribly miscast) and the kid (uh, dumb idea — now we have to deal with the plot complexities of the spawn of Superman?) was really actually quite good. Then again, I agree with other commenters – Superman v. Luthor is too played out. Bring on some real bad guys (Doomsday, Darkseid) that can take it to Superman.
I guess I’d like “dark” Superman, but only if the darkness leads to the light — in other words, that Superman’s All-American “truth, justice, and the American way” apparent mantra was born out of his need to latch on to some ethos or motto to make sense of his isolation/loneliness/otherness. Show THAT in a movie (Superman as troubled outsider, clinging to an imperfect faith in truth/justice/America as a balm for his broken psyche), and you’d have a winner.
The problem with the Superman movie franchise is that Superman now comes across as a relatively frivolous figure in our post-9/11 world. Unlike superheroes like Batman and Spider-Man, who have far more limited powers, Superman should be out busting up the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for Osama Bin Laden rather than saving cats stuck in a tree or stopping one of Lex Luthor’s inane (and mind-numbingly dull) land-grab conspiracies. How’s that for “truth, justice and the American way”?
Pay Attention: The Dark Knight and Batman Begins SUCK!!!
Superman Returns was a great movie.
What has Lex Luthor introduced into the water supply that has everyone so colossally frakked up???
Darker Superman, why just because it works for Batman? How about more complex rather than simply “darker”? Because Hollywood has run out of ideas & are just regurgitating the same stuff over & over.
I’ll join the minority–I liked Superman Returns, and Brandon Routh as the character, but Kate Bosworth and the kid were mistakes. I’ll have to withhold judgment on a dark Superman without seeing it, although the concept doesn’t sound like it fits the character; other than the campy TV series, Batman has always been somewhat dark, whereas Superman has come across as more optimistic to me.
Broody and dark, bright and sunny, or even singing and dancing–the story is paramount. If the storyline stinks, then “Superman” will, too.
Adapt “All Star Superman” by Grant Morrison. It’s a story that pushes sci-fi and begins with Superman flying through the sun to save astronauts and ends with him having a year left to live. It’s truly one of the greatest Superman stories of all time.
I am SICK of hearing Kate Bosworth being blamed for Superman Returns! She wasn’t that bad, she didn’t ‘ruin’ the movie. The problem was the SCRIPT! When will Hollywood understand that a movie starts with the script?! Superman is a hard character anyway, he’s too ‘good & nice’ & I doubt trying to make him darker would help any. Singer tried something different, & it didn’t work that well. But to blame an actor for it, is wrong. There were loads of things that were more of a problem than Bosworth.
By the way, didn’t we have a dark Superman in the third movie. He got drunk, hooked up with that blond on the Statue of Liberty and got into a fight with himself in the trash compactor. I would love to see Darkseid as the villain, but you have to include Lex. I think it would be cool to have a variation of the alternate Earth storyline in the Justice League series and have Superman kill Lex, either accidentally or out of anger, and deal with the consequences from that.
You’re right, missy–I didn’t mention that the storyline had plot holes that you could drive a truck through. I don’t dislike Kate Bosworth, but didn’t feel that she personified Lois Lane. It’s a matter of personal preference, obviously.
I liked Superman Returns. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t nearly as bad and people say it was. Kevin Spacey was my only problem with it. As far as that 20 year old profile goes, it describes a character that hasn’t existed in nearly that long. He has been married to the “woman he can’t really have” for about 15 years and Kent hasn’t been a weak, clumsy bystander for about that long too.
I’m really disappointed to hear this because I loved Superman Returns. Yes it was a bit flawed (lack of action and Kate Bosworth being the main two) but I think Bryan Singer was set to correct those issues in Man Of Steel. Brandon Routh was great and he got the essence of the character. I will be really sad to see if they recast his part.
Superman isn’t meant to be a dark, brooding character. Yes the situation with Lois makes his life complicated but he’s not tortured in the way Bruce Wayne is. It doesn’t seem that Warner Brothers really understands the character.
And why when Batman Begins made $205 million and Superman Returns made $200 million is the latter considered a failure? It doesn’t make any sense and I bet there are a lot of people out there sad that a true sequel to Superman Returns isn’t going to be made.
It’s absolutely hilarious that Bryan Singer can make one of the best television shows on TV, “House”, yet screwed up one of the most popular comic franchises in history. A new Superman doesn’t need to be darker. It needs to be set on an alternate/parallel Earth or something. Superman is the all-American boy scout and he needs to remain that way…unless, they do a movie version of “Red Son”.
Talk about overkill…just what Hollywood and the world needs — another superhero reboot.
PLEEZ!
They can do what they want. I doubt it will have much success just from making it darker.
I totally agree. Superman is irrelevant and the world doesn’t need saving by another superhero. Honestly, who goes to see these movies anyway? They’re just retreads of the same old same old, unless you’re going to turn the superhero into an evil villain, these characters bring nothing to screen.
“ABW Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 02:11 PM EST The problem with the Superman movie franchise is that Superman now comes across as a relatively frivolous figure in our post-9/11 world.”