Superman Lives is horribly overrated if you ask me, yeah it had its good moments and Hopkins was a good Lex Luthor but the film suffered from Cage's schizo Superman, Kevin Smith's all-over-the-place script, no really can somebody explain what was he thinking with that giant spider-I'm sorry "Thanagarian Snare Beast" in the climax? It came out of nowhere and it wasted valuable time we could've spent resolving the plot. It didn't matter in the long run anyway since the Michael Bay-directed sequel Superman Returns was so badly hated the Superman franchise was reburied until Rian Johnson brought it back as part of the DC Cinematic Universe.
Who knows what the film franchise would've been like if Burton's film didn't pan out. Maybe Bryan Singer would've directed it later, he was hoping to direct a sequel to Superman Returns before WB pulled the plug on the whole thing. Although that does mean that the X-Men film series would become very different if he left the series after the first or second film, sure the third one was a bit of clusterf@ck with both the Phoenix Saga being adapted into the same film that introduced the Hellfire Club and there were way too many characters, but Cyclops actually got sh!t to do this time around, Sigourney was awesome as Emma Frost and Famke Janssen was great as Dark Phoenix.