I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Superman Returns. Bryan Singer did a great job with the first two X-Men films, and all signs point to Superman living up to the hype. Of interest to me is the premise of the film itself. Everyone knows that Superman III and IV come after Superman II. What this film presupposes is: what if they didn’t?
Superman, released in 1978 and directed by Richard Donner, is a wonderful film. Donner was actually hired to film both the first movie and the sequel, and did in fact shoot almost all of Superman II, but because of problems with the production and the studio, he was fired from the picture and replaced by another director who reshot the majority of the footage. According to Wikipedia:
Marlon Brando filed suit over his percentage of the first film’s profits, so as a response his scenes were excised from the second film. Director Richard Donner argued with the producers over their attempts to make the film “more campy,” in his opinion, which led to his removal and replacement on the project by Richard Lester. Following that, Gene Hackman declined to return for any reshoots by Lester, which cut down the number of scenes in which he appears in the final cut (or with a few scenes where a body double was obviously being used).
Another reason behind Richard Donner’s removal may have been because the Salkinds were upset that Donner went over their originally planned budget for the movie. Warner Brothers ended up getting more and more involved in the race to complete the film, allowing the studio to receive more profits from the film’s box office take than the Salkinds had originally agreed to. With their power slipping away, Donner was unfortunately made the scapegoat.
Bootlegs of the Donner version of Superman II, reconstructed from unused footage, have been floating around for years, but are currently hard to get due to legal threats from Warner Bros. Singer, who’s directing Superman Returns, is a huge fan of both the original and the Donner sequel, and even includes un-used footage of Marlon Brando shot by Donner.
Of course, it’s a widely believed fact that there are actually four Superman movies, not two. Superman III was released in 1983 and attempted quite poorly to cash in on the franchise and the popularity of Richard Pryor. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace drove the final nail in the coffin, delivering almost nothing worthwhile aside from a token “no nukes” message. Singer has has little love for III and IV, and has explicitly set his new film after II, choosing to pretend that the later sequels simply never happened.
To recap, June’s Superman Returns is meant to be the third film in the series, a sequel to a version of Superman II that was never released in theaters. Not that you need to know any of this to enjoy the film, but I think it’s pretty wild.
Edit: Interview with the screenwriters on this very topic.