WI: Superman Film Franchise Better?

The original Superman franchise suffered from some "death of the franchise" moments. Those can be largely attributed to bad management. Richard Donner was kicked out half way into Superman II, and Dick Lester brought in. Lester would take the helm for 3 and 4 as well. Lester introduced humor, which was out of place in the series, and which could be said to have attributed to 3 and 4 being so poor. But I don't think he's all to blame, and I'm not sure exactly who is at fault. But 3 and 4 were lackluster, and killed the series. And the spinoff "Supergirl" was a bomb.

So the question is, what if such a fate did not befall the Superman film franchise, and the 3rd and 4th installments were good? Could a 5th have been made soon after, bearing in mind Christopher Reeves paralysis would also likely be butterflied?
 
I don't really have much of an issue with respect to the "Quest for Peace." I actually liked the premise.

Here's Superman, a guy who can do anything, he's a big fan of the human race, and here we are, perpetually two minutes from global thermonuclear annihiliation.

I mean, what's the point of saving all those people from burning buildings and landslides and bank robbers if its all just going to go poof! Who wouldn't want to try and do something about it?

Hell, there's Superman: Why isn't he ending famine, moving icebergs to the sahara, terraforming mars, helping NASA along, stopping wars. Why isn't he making the world better, rather than just rescuing Jimmy Olsen every time he stumbles down a mine shaft.

That's basically the premise of Superman 4, and you know, I can respect it. I can even respect the overall conceptual narrative. When Superman tries to make real changes in the world, of course there's going to be reaction. Of course there's going to be unforseen consequences. Of course the people he takes power from, politicians and armies, are going to push back. Certainly they're going to look to manufacture an anti-superman defense or their own tame version of Superman. Maybe in the end, Superman has to step back and grow up and realize that he can't save people from themselves, and try and make the world a better place in some other way.

Where I think it really falls apart is that having bravely decided to go out and wrestle with BIG IDEAS, it didn't know what to do with them, or how to follow through. It couldn't marry the grandeur of its concept to human concerns, couldn't work with subtlty or nuance. What kills it, is that it's trying to do way too much, its like sure, if they had twenty or thirty hours and unlimited budget, they could have maybe gotten all they wanted out of it.

But no one has twenty or thirty hours and unlimited budgets. We economize, we make choices, we have to figure out how to make the story work in ninety minutes and a finite budget. Real art, real genius is making things work within the limitations.

And they just couldn't. So what it comes down to is a thousand small bad decisions in the script, the plotline, the acting, the effects, the editing, and something that perhaps, done right could have been incredibly powerful becomes simply..... meh.

I mean, stop for a moment, visualize Superman IV the way Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman would have written it. Imagine that movie instead.

Cool or what?

Oh well. Maybe there's an alt history.

Actually, that's not completely insane. Alan Moore began his work on Marvelman in 1982. Broke through in America with Swamp Thing in 1983. He wrote a classic Superman story in 1985. He started Watchmen in 1986.
Superman IV? 1987.

I could see a hotshot Alan Moore, going from triumph to triumph in the early 80's, being recruited as a boy wonder by a Christopher Reeves looking for a fresh, brilliant 'realistic' new take.
 
Superman 3? That's just death. Sorry.

The film is not without the glimmer of redemption. The whole storyline of Superman being corrupted by artificial but flawed kryptonite, and revealing an inner darkness, becoming bitter, morose, self loathing, alienated from himself and everyone around him, that's kind of compelling. Even the fissioning of his good side, represented by Clark, and his dark side, and their struggle and reunification seemed to have possibility.

They could have taken that and made a really strong engaging even kick ass film with it.

Instead, they spent their money on Richard Pryor.

God knows why.

Pryor's character was always deeply cynical and knowing, he could be childish and clowning, but he always kept an edge. Even in the most stepin fetchit sort of histrionics, you sensed a cool observant reserve in prior.

It's one reason he worked so well with Gene Wilder. Wilder's innocence could play off against Pryor's knowing. I liked him, he was a smart guy, he was well aware of his own foibles, and he had a lot more range as an actor than he was usually allowed to play.

Exactly the wrong guy for a Superman movie. That took a sort of 'uncritical' gee gosh approach that Pryor simply wouldn't or couldn't do. Instead, he really had nothing left but to play broad and buffoonish, and that was absolutely the wrong approach. His physical slapstick and mugging totally demolished the project.

Throw in that they really didn't bother to write Vaugn's part, and that overall, the arc of Vaugn and his sister as just a jumbled mess.... and you see the problem.

Its strange. The B story would have been perfectly serviceable, even critical as the A story. And instead, it's relegated to the warm up benches, and we get an A story that barely involves superman. It's all about Richard Pryor's character and his misadventures. Superman's a supporting character in his own movie.

It's almost as if the A plot was a separate original script that got surgically sutured onto this movie in an example of Frankensteinian hubris.

I dunno. Kill Richard Pryor early, of keep him, and keep the sort of star-mongering that lead to him, away from the film, and you might have a chance.
 
The original Superman franchise suffered from some "death of the franchise" moments. Those can be largely attributed to bad management. Richard Donner was kicked out half way into Superman II, and Dick Lester brought in. Lester would take the helm for 3 and 4 as well. Lester introduced humor, which was out of place in the series, and which could be said to have attributed to 3 and 4 being so poor. But I don't think he's all to blame, and I'm not sure exactly who is at fault. But 3 and 4 were lackluster, and killed the series. And the spinoff "Supergirl" was a bomb.

So the question is, what if such a fate did not befall the Superman film franchise, and the 3rd and 4th installments were good? Could a 5th have been made soon after, bearing in mind Christopher Reeves paralysis would also likely be butterflied?

Superman is a one trick pony. He can do practically anything and only Kryptonite can stop him.

To be honest getting 2 movies out of it was a great achievement.

Superman returns showed all the weaknesses of making a movie about a man that can do anything and so was reduced to him behaving like a teenager from Porky's peeping on the rather average girl of his dreams in order to make him look human.

Superman is pretty much god on Earth. There's little drama after you show him flying around a few times.
 
I would have had 4 be about Darkseid (Superman's greatest villain IMO). You can have the plot be that Darkseid has conquered several planets but when he finds out that krypton has been destroyed before he could get to it he becomes angry and when he finds out that one kryptonian, superman, survives on Earth he decides to try to conquer Earth. I'd even have Luthor get killed by Darkseid (maybe Luthor, after escaping from jail again, helps Darkseid find Superman, then gets killed by Darkseid once he's of no use to him). It could be a much darker Superman film. Of course, for this to work, you'd have to get a better production company than Cannon films (Their work on the Superman 4 in OTL looked more like low budget mid 80s fare like eliminators and hobgoblins, especially that obvious blue screened flying scene).
 
Brainiac would be the obvious villain to me. Just have him decide to add Metropolis to his collection. Throw in Kandor so that you can wow the audience with more Krypton scenes. Besides, I always thought that they lacked any awesome space battles, the Moon scene in Superman II notwithstanding.
 

Tovarich

Banned
....Real art, real genius is making things work within the limitations....

....I could see a hotshot Alan Moore, going from triumph to triumph in the early 80's, being recruited as a boy wonder by a Christopher Reeves looking for a fresh, brilliant 'realistic' new take.

I don't think Alan Moore is capable of doing screenplays, precisely because it would mean working within limitations!

His comics are brilliant because there need be no limit to what appears on the page (and I wish he'd write more text novels too), but even with comics he's a notorious writer for giving artists pages-long descriptions of every tiny detail for each single panel.

In films, where you have to factor in the limitations on a writer of allowing the director and actors to provide some interpretation of character, and I just don't think he can do it, it's not in his nature.

ETA: I just had to go back and add emphases to my quote from DValdron: If I cannot sleep tonight because of the horrifying vision of Alan Moore in a Robin outfit, I don't see why anybody else should be allowed to sleep easy either!
 
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