by Larry Tye
Finally, in the summer of 2004, Warner Bros. hired Bryan Singer to produce and direct his idea for a story he called Superman Returns. The title showed that he understood what fans were thinking seventeen years after the Man of Steel’s last appearance on the big screen: Give us back our hero. It also made clear that Singer wasn’t planning to rewrite the character but wanted to resurrect the Superman millions of Americans had fallen for in the comics and, more to the point, in the two films directed by Richard Donner. Singer had proven his superhero bona fides by bringing to the screen two successful movies about Marvel Comics’ X-Men. He had vetted his Superman ideas with his friend Donner before presenting them to Warner, which was desperate to make good on the promises it had made when it reclaimed the movie rights a decade earlier. Just how delighted it was to have Singer on board became clear when the studio gave him a budget of $210 million for the new film, which might have been a record. Just how novel what he was attempting was wouldn’t become clear until later, when a movie historian called Superman Returns the first feature film ever to be part of a franchise without being a remake, a prequel, or a sequel. What it was, Wayne Lewellen added, is “a modern blending of the core elements that have endured for nearly 70 years.”
Singer’s film, released in June 2006, couldn’t answer why it had taken nearly twenty years for Superman to return, but it did explain what the hero had been doing for the last five. He was off looking for what astronomers said were the remains of Krypton. While he didn’t find any survivors, he did find his earthly world transformed by the time he got back. Lois had had a son, gotten engaged, and won a Pulitzer Prize for her story “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Lex had married an old widow whose fortune would finance his latest plot to dominate the world. Stopping his old enemy was as instinctual as flying for Superman, but it was certainly hard getting used to seeing Lois in another man’s arms. Harder still for the Man of Steel: not knowing whether her son, Jason, was his son, too.
The first clue came when the boy seemed to be weakened by the kryptonite Lex had stolen from the Metropolis Museum. The evidence became conclusive when Jason saved himself and his mother by using a piano to crush Luthor’s thug. In the end, Lois whispered a secret into Superman’s ear when she and Jason visited him in the hospital, unsure if he would come out of a kryptonite-induced coma. When Superman woke up, he visited a sleeping Jason and recited to him the parting words he had heard from his father, Jor-El, in the first Salkind film: “You will be different. You will sometimes feel like an outcast. But you will not be alone. You will never be alone.” Lois, meanwhile, wrote a corrective to her award-winning story, calling it “Why the World Needs a Superman.”
The dialogue wasn’t the only part of Superman Returns intended as an homage to Alex and Ilya’s first two movies. Its star was, too. Bryan Singer was looking for an unknown, just as Richard Donner had been when he chose Christopher Reeve, and both directors picked actors who needed to add ballast and brawn to convince anyone they were strongmen. Brandon Routh, like Reeve, had acted in a soap opera, and both were twenty-six when they assumed the mantles of Clark and Superman. Routh, who had an angular jaw and six-foot-three-inch frame, had been told all his life he looked like Reeve, especially when he wore his blue-tinted contact lenses. When, as a young boy, he saw Reeve’s first film, he got so excited that “I gave myself a migraine. I was puking through half of the movie.” Years later, when Routh was picked to succeed Reeve, Christopher’s widow, Dana, told him she was struck by the resemblance. She said he was a fitting successor to her husband, who had died just months before. “I can’t tell you what that was like to get her blessing,” Routh said. “It’s frightening trying to fill Christopher Reeve’s shoes.” Dana herself died of cancer in March 2006, seventeen months after Christopher and three months before the opening of the movie, which was dedicated to both of them.
Singer took another cue from the earlier movies by signing up big names to play Lex Luthor and Jor-El. Kevin Spacey, whom Singer had gotten to know when Spacey delivered an Oscar-winning performance for the director ten years before in The Usual Suspects, gave his audience a villain who knew how to use humor as disarmingly as Gene Hackman had and was even better at anger. As for Jor-El, Singer couldn’t have topped Marlon Brando and he didn’t try. Rather, he and Warner Bros. negotiated with the estate of Brando, who died in 2004, for the rights to use not just the footage that had already appeared in the first movie but other scenes unearthed from a warehouse in Kansas.
The Superman legend didn’t begin with the Salkind movies and Singer didn’t stop with them in trying to reel back old fans. He cast eighty-five-year-old Noel Neill, the original live-action Lois Lane, as Lex’s dying wife, Gertrude Vanderworth. Jack Larson, whose Jimmy Olsen played alongside Neill’s Lois on TV, was back for his own movie cameo as Bo the bartender, wearing his distinctive bow tie and looking younger than his seventy-eight years. While both were delighted to be part of the ongoing legend, “Our George,” as Neill explained, “will always be Superman to us.”
One way to measure the change in Superman over the decades was to watch him fly. As determined as George Reeves was, and as much as Christopher Reeve lived up to the hype of making us believe a man could fly, Brandon Routh set a new standard. In scenes where animation was used, a cyber scan of the actor duplicated him down to the hair on his ears and the tastebuds on his tongue. For shots of the real Routh airborne, a new digital camera brought intimacy and editing ease, while computers painted out the wires and cranes as they had for Tom Welling in Smallville but couldn’t when Reeve was doing his tour of the city with Margot Kidder. Even Routh’s skintight supersuits were space-age. At a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the sixty tricolored costumes were fitted not with clothespins or caster molds, but using an electronic mapping device so precise that the actor wasn’t allowed to add or shed even an ounce until the film was out.
Michael Dougherty, who with his co-writer managed to craft the movie-ready script that had eluded a lineup of other writers, says the experience was both universal and highly personal. “Writing a story like this is almost biblical, when you hear how the Bible was passed down orally from year to year. The Superman character has been passed from one person to the next and one generation to the next,” he says. “My grandmother still loves more than anything the black and white George Reeves show, the Superman that she grew up with. For Bryan and I and Dan it was the Donner films, and today’s teenagers gravitate towards Smallville, which I can appreciate simply because I love the character. There’s a Superman for every generation.” Staying true to that history was just half the process for Dougherty. The other half was pure fun: “It’s indescribable—what it’s like to stand on the Fortress of Solitude set. To walk into a room and there’s Superman standing there. To hang out at the Daily Planet. It’s really emotional. It’s a blast.”
That’s not the way things started out for John Ottman, who composed the score. “I was practically getting death threats from fans of the Donner version,” says Ottman, who had edited and composed for Singer in The Usual Suspects. “They worried I wouldn’t do the right thing with the music and asked why John Williams wasn’t writing the scores the way he had for Donner. I started getting crippled, worrying what fans were thinking. Finally I said to myself that I have to ignore all that and weave in my own sensibilities and style, and of course nod to the Williams theme, which I’d always intended to. The fan reaction was that if they could have sent me flowers, they would have. They all were very happy.”
Bryan Singer was under the most intense microscope. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t Donner, but he was openly gay, and film critics wondered whether his hero would be, too. It was a fair question; the mutant X-Men in Singer’s movies concealed their powers, were shunned as outsiders, and had characters in their orbit who were openly lesbian or gay. “Superheroes—let’s face it—are totally hot,” arts editor Alonso Duralde argued in a cover story titled “How Gay Is Superman?” in The Advoc
ate, a gay-oriented magazine. “Not for nothing does gay director Bryan Singer have an eye for how to make the Superman suit most flattering to Brandon Routh.” It wasn’t the kind of publicity Warner Bros. had hoped for, and Singer felt compelled to publicly assure fans that Superman Returns was the “most heterosexual movie I’ve ever made.” Any remaining doubts were washed away when Singer made clear that Superman had fathered Lois’s child and still was in love with her, no matter that she had a fiancé.
Sex wasn’t the only hot button for the producer-director. America-first bloggers were livid about a superhero who they said had been made too global in his outlook and thereby not all-American enough. The flash point came when Perry White told his reporters to find out whether Superman, after being away for five years, still stood for “truth, justice … all that stuff.” “Warner Brothers, the studio distributing the movie, doesn’t want to tee off any foreign viewers with pro-U.S. sentiments,” railed Bill O’Reilly. “It’s bad enough Superman was raised in the Midwest; we can’t be having the hero actually standing for the American way, now can we? Some jihadist in Pakistan might throw popcorn at the screen.” It was left to Erik Lundegaard, who wrote about movies for the liberal MSNBC.com, to come to the defense of Singer and Superman. “There’s no reason to be upset,” he wrote in a New York Times commentary. “Superman is right back where he began: fighting a never-ending battle for truth and justice. That should be enough to occupy any man. Even a Superman.”
Singer had to coordinate not just with editors at DC Comics, who were determined to keep Superman true to his roots, but with the producers of Smallville, who wanted exclusive rights to Superman’s adolescence. He had to cope with mishaps—from his producer being mugged, to his editor puncturing a lung when he fell through a window, to a cameraman fracturing his skull in a tumble down a flight of stairs—that added to the legend of a curse. And he had to do everything in record-setting time. It took just two years from his deciding to make the movie, without a script in hand, to its premiere in movie theaters—a process so demanding that “at one point I just stopped shooting,” Singer says. “I was physically exhausted and mentally destroyed. I needed to take three weeks off.”
Even with those constraints, Singer told the story he wanted to. Like the Death of Superman comic book series a decade earlier, Superman Returns answered the question of whether the hero still mattered. He did, more than ever. The movie revisited the Christ story by looking at whether society still wanted and needed a savior. The answer was yes. Like the previous Superman films, this one was about secrets, but the secret that mattered here wasn’t Superman’s alter ego but his past intimacy with Lois and the son they had conceived. The only ones who knew were Lois, Superman, and the sixty million people who watched their movie. Millions more saw it in 3-D, and it was the first live-action film Hollywood had produced in the IMAX format.
“They’re very important, these comic book movies, because they’re our modern myths,” said Singer. “What Superman represents is idealism in a physical form.” The film also had a personal resonance for its director, who, like Superman, was an only child, an orphan, and an outsider. “Superman Returns,” he says, looking back, “suddenly opened that whole history to me.”
Critics understandably compared Singer’s film to the Donner and Reeve renditions, which had turned into icons over time. “Earlier versions of Superman stressed the hero’s humanity: his attachment to his Earth parents, his country-boy clumsiness around Lois,” wrote Richard Corliss of Time. “The Singer version emphasizes his divinity. He is not a super man; he is a god (named Kal-El) sent by his heavenly father (Jor-El) to protect Earth. That is a mission that takes more than muscles; it requires sacrifice, perhaps of his own life. So he is no simple comic book hunk. He is Earth’s savior: Jesus Christ Superman.” But was it a good movie? Corliss asked himself. “You bet,” he answered. “Made with precision and vigor, the film never forgets to entertain.… The best Hollywood movies always knew how to sneak a beguiling subtext into a crowd-pleasing story. Superman Returns is in that grand tradition. That’s why it’s beyond Super. It’s superb.” Richard Donner agrees, saying the Singer film “stayed very much within the honest traditions. When that little child shoots the piano [across the room] I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ Bryan did a super job, a really sensational job.”
Others felt the film didn’t measure up. Routh “offers not so much his personal interpretation of Superman as his best impersonation of Christopher Reeve playing Superman. This feels constrained, to say the least,” Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker. “Singer’s casting errs toward the drippy and the dull, and your heart tends to sink, between the rampant set pieces, as the movie pauses listlessly for thought.” Mike D’Angelo of Las Vegas Weekly was harsher still, writing, “Fidelity is one thing; slavish imitation another.” And The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called Superman Returns “leaden.” Rotten Tomatoes gave it a composite critics’ rating of 76 percent—a record that would make any director proud unless they were comparing themselves to Donner, who scored 94 percent for his 1978 film and 88 percent for Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut.
Results at the box office also were mixed. The film took in $200 million in domestic sales and another $191 million overseas, which sounded like a lot but wasn’t stacked up against production costs and what Marvel Comics had raked in for its blockbuster movies. The original Spider-Man grossed $822 million in 2002, and its sequel two years later hit $784 million. The third X-Men movie, out a month before Superman Returns, brought in $459 million. Superman was even losing out to his DC brother Batman, whose masterwork back in 1989 had taken in $411 million—or $668 million in 2006 dollars—while his Dark Knight in 2008 would gross just over $1 billion. Superman Returns “was a very successful movie, but I think it should have done $500 million worldwide,” said Warner Bros. president Alan Horn. “We should have had perhaps a little more action to satisfy the young male crowd.”
The box office may have been how Horn measured his studio’s success, but parent company Time Warner took a broader view. Superman Returns cashed in on a big-time deal with Burger King under which the hamburger chain displayed Superman toys, Superman banners, and Superman fast-food wrappings at 8,500 of its restaurants. Pepsi rolled out more than a billion cans of super-strength Superman soda. Frito-Lay encouraged its customers to test their super hearing at displays that amplified the sound of them munching Lay’s and Cheetos snacks. Mattel sold inflatable muscle suits, Cap’n Crunch cereal came with red S-shaped shields that turned milk blue, an Orlando game maker released a Superman Returns video game, and Brandon Routh sported a white mustache in “got milk” ads. A&E aired a Superman documentary just before the film came out, narrated by Kevin Spacey, and the National Geographic Channel countered with a Science of Superman special. In total Warner Bros. collected more than $80 million from Superman Returns licensing deals in America, and substantially more overseas.
Superman had once again demonstrated why he belonged as a summertime Hollywood blockbuster, even if his handlers had not made the same case for themselves. Singer had been hired with the hope of launching a new film franchise for America’s signature superhero, just as Routh was intended to replace Christopher Reeve as the defining Superman for his generation. Even the ending of Superman Returns—with the hero passing the mantle to his son and letting Lois know he was back to stay—was tailor-made for a sequel. But a new film called The Man of Steel, intended to air during the summer of 2009, died on the vine. While Warner Bros. is making another Superman movie, neither Singer nor Routh is involved.
JERRY SIEGEL AND JOE SHUSTER’S story read like a movie script from the beginning, and the drama didn’t end with their deaths.
To Jerry’s widow, Joanne, it was a tragedy, and after decades of Jerry being the victim, she and her daughter, Laura, now assumed that role. Joanne may have been the model for Lois Lane’s looks, but it was Laura who lived Lois’s life as an award-winning radio newscaster and talk show host, TV rep
orter and anchor, and news and documentary producer. Now Laura had multiple sclerosis and couldn’t work, and Joanne was getting old. They notified DC, Warner Bros., and Time Warner in 1997 that they planned to reclaim the copyright Jerry had signed away in 1938. So much for the promise not to sue that he made back in 1948 and reaffirmed in 1975. Since then federal laws had made it easier to redress perceived wrongs from the past, and the Siegels had had two more decades to stew over how shabbily they had been treated. It was Jerry’s dying wish that they set things right, his daughter said. What she and her mother wanted was the nest egg they felt they deserved. So their attorneys and DC’s sat down to talk.
They talked and talked some more. Finally, in the fall of 2001, it looked as if the lawyers had agreed on a deal. On October 16, DC set out the general terms of a plan to pay Joanne and Laura nearly $1 million a year each for the rest of their lives. Three days later, their lawyers signed on. Sensing how near they were to a resolution, DC had already given the Siegels a nonrefundable advance of $250,000, and four months later the company sent them a full-blown agreement. That is when things imploded, although why remains a matter of heated dispute.
“We were stabbed in the back with a shocking contract” that included “new, outrageous demands,” Joanne wrote to Time Warner boss Richard Parsons. “The document is a heartless attempt to rewrite the history of Superman’s creation and to strip Laura and me of the dignity and respect that we deserve.… My disabled daughter still has not received the medical coverage she and her children were promised several years ago,” she added, her anger building as the three-page letter proceeded. “Just like the Gestapo, your company wants to strip us naked of our legal rights. Is that moral?” In spite of the letter, negotiations continued for another four months, at which point the Siegels fired their old attorney, hired a new one, and sued Time Warner, Warner Bros., and DC.
