Superman Returns (spoilers)

Forty-seven thousand times NO!

Superman needs to stay classic. We don't need any Tim Burton Batman shenanigans. Superman is not a dark knight.

 

You have, I take it, seen the documentary or read Kevin Smith's take on dealing with Jon Peters while trying to write a Superman script, before Burton came aboard. Hilarious.

 

Link?

 

Wasn't the Kevin Smith story that a studio head insisted that Superman fight a huge spider? The exec was so obsessed with spiders that he finally got his wish in Wild, Wild West, which may be one of the worst movies of all time...

 

Watching that A&E special on Superman and seeing Superman in a black suit with a removable "S" shield that became a "throwing star" type weapon, Superman Returns wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Also, Bosworth just isn't old enough to play Lois Lane. She looks more like an intern than a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

 

The exec in question was the aforementioned Jon "The Hairdresser" Peters, who also wanted to have a non-flying Superman wearing black body armor (in fact, he insisted on a non-flying Superman) using Kryptonian gadgets and battling multiple villains at once --- in other words, a carbon copy of Peters' ruinous take on the Batman franchise. Basically, he was thinking ahead to how much he could make on toy sales, a la Batman.

The S logo on the armored suit would have done double duty as knives.

 

Peters is still attached to the movie, as executive associate producer or something. It's kind of blood-curdling to see him on TV discussing the movie, thinking of the clusterfuck he would have made out of it.

 

That ... was awesome.

 

Speaking of Kevin Smith talking about people who tried to ruin the Superman franchise, here's his take on Tim Burton from the same series of college lectures.

And if I could get YouTube's embedding code to work, Webby would track me down and deliver my carcass to a taxidermist by midnight I would. But it doesn't. So I can't.

 

That's true about Bosworth, but she looked so damned good that after a while I just didn't care.

 

That Kevin Smith clip about meeting with Jon Peters was great. That's how you tell a story right there.