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Why did Superman Returns fail? Romanticism and religious allegory, says Bryan Singer
Posted by Den Shewman on Sunday, May 8, 2011
Audiences wanted gritty, not nostalgic, says the director. The Christ imagery probably didn’t help any.
X-Men: First Class producer Bryan Singer is hitting the press trail for his new movie, so VoicesFromKrypton.com decided to ask Singer about why his 2006 film Superman Returns, shall we say, underperformed.
First, let’s set the scene back in 2006. Just before Returns opened, Warner Bros. had judged Superman and Batman, its two then-dormant superhero franchises, each to be worth over $3 billion in revenue from movies, TV shows, merchandising, and other corporate strategies and synergies. (In fact, in 2006 the CW’s Smallville was in its sixth year and going strong.) Singer’s Brandon Routh-starring film was expected to spark a new wave of Superman films and products. Instead, it killed the franchise for years. And that must have been very painful for Singer, who retreated from directing X-Men 3 at the 11th hour when he was offered a chance to do a Superman movie.
Superman Returns was released on June 28, 2006, eventually making $391 million worldwide. That’s no $3 billion, but on the surface it sounds like a great box office gross. Except when you scratch the surface to discover the film cost $270 million to make, not including tens of millions more to market. And keep in mind that Warners has to split box office receipts with its theater exhibitors. Now all of a sudden $391 million and a dead franchise doesn’t look so good.
To add insult to injury, a week later Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest premiered to a record-setting $135.6 million opening weekend. The sequel to a film based on a ride at Disneyland would eventually take in over $1 billion. Dead Man's Chest made $30 million more in the US than Superman Returns made in the entire world.
Now that you know the context, let’s give the talking stick to Mr. Singer.
Singer said that there are certain expectations made of films released in the summer, and his superhero film was, basically, too nice to survive. “I think that Superman Returns was a bit nostalgic and romantic, and I don't think that was what people were expecting, especially in the summer.” He believes that audiences expected Returns to be gritty and realistic, like the X-Men movies he had just directed. But Singer wanted Returns to be “a romantic movie that harkens back to the Richard Donner movie [1978’s Superman] that I loved so much.”
Singer reiterated several times during the interview that he was making Returns as a giant summer film for women, traditionally not the main audience for superhero comic book movies. “I really do think I was making the film for that Devil Wears Prada audience of women who wouldn’t normally come to a superhero film.”
Next up, the filmmaker posits that Returns might have been too emotionally complex for its own good. “[Y]ou had that complicated relationship between the Richard White character [James Marsden] and Lois Lane [Kate Bosworth] that might have thrown people off... This is me extrapolating, but the relationship [between Superman and Lois] in the Donner film was so black and white and here it was complex. Adding to that, of course, was the child that was involved.”
But there's another child related to this film as well: Moses. “I’ve always felt that the origin of Superman is the story of Moses: the child sent on a ship to fulfill a destiny,” Singer said. “And this was a story about Christ. It’s all about sacrifice: ‘The world, I hear their cries.’”
Singer’s Christ-like view of Superman is shown in several moments in the film, including when Luthor shanks Kal-El with a kryptonite knife. “[Superman] gets the knife in the side and later he falls to the earth in the shape of a crucifix,” Singer said. He admits that these were obvious religious metaphors, and that he had hoped to do his own version on them, “which is heavy shit for a summer movie. But definitely the nostalgic, romantic aspects of it worked against people’s expectations of it in the climate.”
Looking back on how the film was received by audiences, would Singer change anything? “If I could go back, I would have tightened the first act. Maybe open with the plane or something.”
What about taking another shot at it? Would Singer ever do another Superman movie? Maybe, under one condition: it would be a reboot. “I would go back and redo the original,” he said of this recent revelation. “It would be a much less romantic, more balls-to-the-wall action movie. It would be a very different pace than Superman Returns, which I can say at this point because I have distance from it now.” So, presumably exactly what Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder are doing now.
Thurston McQ
Location: Germany
Posts: 142
Posted: 12 years 46 weeks ago
The religious symbolism was a little too heavy, and the super kid was iffy. I enjoyed it for the most part, though, and 3/4 of the reviews for it were positive. (Same could probably be said for Revenge of the Sith. People are still bitching about it. Rightly so, I think.) The hate took some time to build. I feel like the wave of a vocal minority's animosity ended up being ridden by a lot more people than originally disliked the movie.