For Superman, sequels are kryptonite

For Superman, sequels are kryptonite

James Gunn’s pointedly bright, colorful, canine-forward new movie, “Superman,” is the second launch in a dozen years of a new shared cinematic universe wherein the superhero in chief is gradually — or in this case, immediately — surrounded by other DC Comics heroes.

This summer’s big tentpole from DC’s rival, Marvel Studios, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” is proof enough that while DC has struggled to match Marvel’s success building a multifilm series spotlighting even its C- and D-list superheroes, Marvel’s page-to-screen track record is far from what a comic book collector would call mint. The Pedro Pascal- and Vanessa Kirby-starring “First Steps,” which opened Thursday, is the fourth attempt to launch a Fantastic Four movie franchise since 1994.

From left, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy and David Corenswet as Clark Kent.

But all contemporary superhero movies, including “Guardians of the Galaxy” auteur Gunn’s latest hit, live in the shadow of Richard Donner’s “Superman,” a blockbuster as elegant as it was epic. Premiering at the Kennedy Center in December 1978, five days before its wide release, Donner’s sophisticated but still kid-friendly spectacular offered the first persuasive evidence that a comic book character could be adapted for the movies with top-tier production values and mainstream appeal.

The $134 million domestic tally that “Superman” rang up circa 1978-1979 is the equivalent of $641 million today — more than 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine,” more than 2023’s “Barbie.” A handful of recent-ish Marvel movies have bested the 47-year-old Super-flick’s inflation-adjusted domestic gross: The 2018 and 2019 Avengers sequels that represented the culmination of the ambitious Marvel Studios experiment, along with 2018’s “Black Panther” and 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” In 2002, the first Sam Raimi-directed “Spider-Man” outearned Donner’s “Superman,” too, and in 1989, Tim Burton’s “Batman” colonized the box office — and the zeitgeist — even more forcefully than “Superman” had a decade earlier. But none of these movies would have happened without Donner’s template: embraced by nerds but safe for normies, too.

“Superman” bankrollers Alexander and Ilya Salkind attempted a simultaneous two-film production of the type those latter Avengers pictures would successfully pull off some 40 years later. A much-debated portion of “Superman II” was filmed concurrently with “Superman” in 1977-1978, and Part 2 was intended to hit theaters just a year after Part 1. But production was slow and Donner was exacting, and eventually the Salkinds ordered him to stop work on the sequel to ensure “Superman” would make its Christmas ’78 release.

Despite the movie’s critical and commercial success, by the time “Superman II” resumed production in September 1979, the Salkinds had fired Donner and replaced him with “A Hard Day’s Night” director Richard Lester. Lester told Donner he’d taken the gig because the Salkinds still owed him money for “The Three Musketeers” and “The Four Musketeers” — a 1973 and ’74 pair of hits that had been shot as a single film and halved in postproduction, much to the annoyance of the cast members, who were paid for one movie, not two.

So began the slow fade of the first big-time Superman franchise. And just in case the new movie puts you in the mood to relive some other sequels, here’s a guide.

‘Superman II’ (1981, directed by Richard Lester)

“No one who leads so many could possibly kneel so quickly.”

After Donner rebuffed Lester’s offer to share credit on the sequel Donner had already largely shot, Lester took the reins in full, resulting in a Part 2 that’s diminished but not disastrous. Lester shot enough new material, and by some accounts reshot enough of Donner’s scenes, for even a casual viewer to see his preference for deflating slapstick over Donner’s earnestness and grandeur. “Superman II” picks up the story of Terence Stamp’s General Zod and his two accomplices, who were convicted of conspiracy to overthrow Planet Krypton’s government in the early moments of Donner’s film. The presence of a trio of villains with the same powers as Superman, minus his paternal affection for humankind, gives the movie some juice, as does Stamp’s memorably chilly performance. The secondary storyline dramatizes Superman’s choice to renounce his powers and live as the Earthbound, puny human boyfriend of Lois Lane. Like Lois’s death in the third act of “Superman,” this cataclysmal event is drained of all dramatic heft when it turns out to be, like the rotation of the Earth itself … reversible.

“Superman II” was shot across four calendar years, which explains why stars Christopher Reeve and especially Margot Kidder look noticeably different from scene to scene. Gene Hackman, who played real-estate-obsessed supervillain Lex Luthor in “Superman,” refused to return to set with Lester in charge, which is why some Luthor scenes in “Superman II” feature a body double whose dubbed voice doesn’t sound much like Hackman — though scenes Hackman shot for Donner are present, some are overdubbed with new dialogue. The Salkinds didn’t want to pay Marlon Brando the percentage he was due for the use of his already-shot material as Superman’s birth father, Jor-El, which is why Kryptonian super-mama Susannah York, who spoke only a few words in “Superman,” becomes the main confidante to her son, Kal-El, in “Superman II.” Compromise abounds, and yet “Superman II” was still huge, taking in the 2025 equivalent of $385 million domestically.

‘Superman III’ (1983, Richard Lester)

Christopher Reeve and Richard Pryor in “Superman III.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to save you because I don’t do that anymore.”

When Richard Pryor announced on “The Tonight Show” that he loved the Superman movies, married screenwriters Leslie and David Newman were watching. Warner Bros. was higher on their bizarre pitch to reimagine the flagship franchise as a PG-rated Pryor vehicle than they were on the pricey-sounding story treatment Ilya Salkind had submitted, which featured extraterrestrial cyborg supervillain Brainiac and an interdimensional imp named Mister Mxyzptlk (maybe Dudley Moore).

Salkind’s convoluted treatment also mooted Supergirl as a love interest for Superman with spin-off potential, another idea Warners nixed. So they got Pryor to play a computer programmer who goes to work for an ersatz Luthor stand-in (Robert Vaughn) but eventually rebels against his evil boss.

With Donner out of the way, Lester indulges his love of silly comedy and his disinterest in grandeur, inspiration, heroism or Superman. The movie is memorable only for the subplot, wherein exposure to synthetic kryptonite turns Big Blue into a louche, unshaven (!) jerk before bifurcating his personality entirely, culminating in a junkyard fight between Clark Kent and the Man of Steel. Annette O’Toole is charming as Clark’s Smallville sweetheart Lana Lang, and you have to love it when Clark refers to himself as a “big-city sophisticate,” but the screwball energy of Kidder — whose role was reduced to a brief pair of scenes at the beginning and end of the film — is badly missed. The Newmans assumed that Pryor would punch up their so-so jokes on the fly. He didn’t. The movie took in the 2025 equivalent of $260 million worldwide — still in the black but another big drop-off.

‘Supergirl’ (1984, Jeannot Szwarc)

“Power of Shadow, destroyyyyyy herrrrrrrrr!”

With Reeve ready to hang up his cape after the underwhelming “Superman III,” the Salkinds looked at what other characters were included in the rights package they’d purchased a decade earlier. As they had back in 1977, they buoyed their unknown title role filler — 19-year-old Helen Slater, who won the part of Superman’s cousin (not lover!) Kara Zor-El over Demi Moore and Brooke Shields — with a pair of venerable stars: Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway, in “Mommie Dearest”-plus-100 mode as a witch, and (then) seven-time Oscar nominee Peter O’Toole, who appears to be plotting the murder of his agent in every frame. The director? “Jaws 2” auteur Jeannot Szwarc. When Reeve changed his mind about a cameo to which he’d initially agreed, the Salkinds got Marc McClure — soon to play Marty McFly’s loser brother in 1985’s biggest hit — to reprise his role as Daily Planet photographer Jimmy Olsen. Somehow, “Supergirl” was the series’ first unmitigated belly flop.

‘Superman IV: The Quest for Peace’ (1987, Sidney J. Furie)

“Everybody’s saying that he’s dead, but it can’t be true. … I think he just needs help.”

Hey, a subtitle! After the failure of “Supergirl,” the Salkinds sold the Superman film rights to schlock merchants Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who took a run at getting Donner and script doctor Tom Mankiewicz back for a film born out of Reeve’s personal desire to make Superman an agent of nuclear disarmament. Donner said no, and went off to make “Lethal Weapon,” which would invert the “Superman” trend for Warner Bros. by becoming a franchise wherein each of its first three chapters outearned its precursor by a big margin. “The Ipcress File” and “Iron Eagle” director Sidney J. Furie, meanwhile, said sure. As for Hackman, his return as Luthor was presumably settled before the movie’s budget was abruptly cut by more than half, resulting in a big-screen superhero epic with direct-to-syndication TV production values.

The movie tries to replay the earlier films’ greatest hits, giving us another interview between Superman and a panting Lois, another shared-flight-as-chaste-sex scene, and another amnesia-inducing super-kiss like the one Big Blue administered at the end of “Superman II” to make Lois forget the revelation that he and Clark Kent are the same man.

As dire as the whole thing is, it introduces not one but two major ideas that Gunn would resurrect for his 2025 “Superman”: The new owner of the Daily Planet is determined to whip up anti-Superman sentiment among the public, much as Nicholas Hoult’s Luthor does in the new film, and Luthor uses a strand of Superman’s hair to create a pliant super-clone who can go toe-to-toe with Kal, exactly as Luthor does in the new film. IV’s villain, Nuclear Man, is played by Mark Pillow, a 6-foot-4, lantern-jawed, mulleted side of English beef who looks a lot like Henry Cavill, the unjustly maligned Superman of the justly maligned Zack Snyder trio of DC movies that took flight with 2013’s “Man of Steel.”

Despite a few Superman projects that almost happened in the years that followed, including an abandoned late 1990s project from “Batman” director Burton that would have starred Nicolas Cage in the title role, “The Quest for Peace” was a bomb so radioactive it kept the granddad of all superheroes in a coma for 19 years.

‘Superman Returns’ (2006, Bryan Singer)

Kate Bosworth and Brandon Routh in “Superman Returns.”

“Didn’t you win the Pulitzer Prize for my favorite article of all time — ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’?”

Bryan Singer’s elegiac, or as some members of its target audience had it, boring, long-tail super-sequel represents one of the earliest examples of the now-common practice of a franchise mulligan: It’s set a single-digit number of years after the events of “Superman II,” released 25 years earlier in Earth time, and it ignores the three intervening super-flicks. The movie features what might still be the most thrilling rescue in any Superman movie, with the hero trying various means of preventing a flaming airliner from crashing — Lois is on board, naturally — and takes genuine narrative risks. One of them is having Superman spend much of the 2½-hour film’s third act in a hospital bed. Though seemingly little remembered now, this a stronger, more thoughtful, more artfully made superhero movie than its ho-hum reputation would suggest.

Reeve had been paralyzed in a tragic equestrian accident in 1995 and died right around the time “Returns” was going into production in 2004. Newcomer Brandon Routh steps into his cape and boots more capably than Kate Bosworth occupies Lois’s pumps, playing a single mom who has moved on during the five years Supes was away from Earth searching for other survivors of Krypton, his exploded home world. She’s in a relationship with a character played by James Marsden, who, like Singer and his two screenwriters, was coming off the X-Men movie series, and she claims this nice-guy rival to Clark Kent is the father of her young son (even though the kid has been known to display what a 1940s radio announcer might call “powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men”). Kevin Spacey is perfectly believable as the predatory opportunist Luthor here. Go figure.

“Superman Returns” was a hit, taking in the 2025 equivalent of $622 million worldwide, but enthusiasm among critics and fans was muted — a descriptor that also sums up the picture’s tone. It was handily outgrossed that year by the three-quel “X-Men: The Last Stand,” which Singer had passed on to make this film. The movie’s so-so profits led Warner Bros. to scuttle a planned sequel, and seven years would pass before Cavill would take us into the Snyderverse with “Man of Steel” — the violent, dour but still underrated origin story to which Gunn’s “Superman” has been conceived as a hope-and-change-minded remedy.