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Superman Series: Development Hell

By Dr. Geek, Ph.D. | Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 12:01 am

Development Hell

Just what the hell was going on for two decades?

The Geeks of Doom are counting down to June 30, the day “Superman Returns” flies into theaters. Every week till then, we’ll explore another aspect of the Man of Steel’s universe.

It is nearly 20 years since the last live action Superman film, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. Where have you been, Kal-El? Fighting some intergalactic villain and saving far-off planets? Visiting some lost relatives who also escaped the destruction of your home planet Krypton? Gathering strength in your Fortress of Solitude for some great trial looming in the near future? As the British would say, not bloody likely. Of all the villains that Superman has faced over the years, the producers and film executives of Hollywood may prove to be the most dastardly and difficult of all by keeping Superman prisoner in the Phantom Zone of movie development hell.

To understand how this came to pass, let us review a little ancient Hollywood history. The father/son production team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind originally owned the rights to make Superman films back in the 1970s. They made two films that are generally considered to be pretty good (Superman: The Movie and Superman II); one more that probably relied too much camp humor (Superman III); and one that was an outright disaster (Supergirl). The Salkinds then sold their interests in Superman — aside from the rights to make the TV series Superboy — to Cannon Productions. Cannon was founded and run by the Israeli production team of Manachem Golan and Yoram Globus and was mostly known for making B-grade action pictures starring Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Golan and Globus made Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, the worst of the four films starring Christopher Reeve. Cannon planned a fifth Superman movie with another actor in the lead role but went bankrupt before the film could be made. The rights for Superman films reverted back to the Salkinds, who wanted to make a Superboy prequel film based on their TV series. Before it could be made, Warner Brothers studios stepped in and bought up all TV and movie rights for the Superman character in 1993. Warner Brothers made Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and gave Batman producer Jon Peters the task of developing a new Superman film.

From here, Peters sought out a large number of writers and directors (and by extension, stars) to work with on the Superman film project over the next ten years. As a starting point for a screenplay, he inherited two basic ideas for a film. The first was a battle between Superman and intergalactic superhuman intelligence Brainiac originally suggested for the Salkind’s Superboy film. The second was a suggestion from executives at Warner Brothers to capitalize on the “death and return” story line battle between Superman and Doomsday that garnered a lot of attention in the DC Comic books at the time. These ideas would reappear more than once during the next few years as various writers and directors wrote and re-wrote scripts to come up with a worthy Superman concept. Rather than chronicle the full list of writers (probably over a dozen) and directors (nearly half a dozen), it better illustrates how badly the creative process went astray to look at three major visions of the Superman film that never made it off the drawing board.

The first concept involves writer/director Kevin Smith. With his film Chasing Amy recently completed and generating good pre-release buzz, Smith was called in by executives at Warner Brothers to do some contract script work. He was offered a number of script ideas to develop or substantially revise, and was eventually shown an early script for the Superman movie by Gregory Poirer. After reading the script and discussing it with some Superman fan friends, he felt he had little to lose by telling Warner Brothers executives how bad he thought it was from the point of view of a comic book aficionado.

After a series of meetings involving more and more senior Warner Brothers executives, Smith met with Jon Peters and was eventually offered the chance to re-write the script. Peters laid down three major things that he wanted to see in the script:

Superman should never be seen flying on screen.
Superman should not wear the classic blue and red suit and cape.
Superman should fight a gigantic spider (later re-named a Tharangian Snare Beast) somewhere starting in the third act of the film.

Smith tried to work around these demands in creative ways (making Superman a blur that generates a sonic boom while in flight, for example) and eventually produced a script involving Superman, Brainiac, and Lex Luthor. Further demands from Peters for a fight between Brainiac and polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude, and a space dog sidekick for Lex Luther (to add the “Chewbacca factor” to film merchandising) were ultimately rejected. The resulting script was strong enough to get Nicholas Cage and Tim Burton involved with the film under multimillion dollar “pay or play” contracts. Smith’s involvement ended when Burton insisted that one of the writers he regularly worked with should be used to write the script. When remembering the experience, Smith likes to point out that Warner Brothers elected to make and release one of Jon Peters’s other films in development at the time Wild Wild West that also featured a fight with a giant spider!

The second major version of the Superman movie is the one developed with Burton for Cage. This vision of Superman saw him as a dark, alien outsider living on Earth who was dependent on Kryptonian technology to perform superhuman feats. Based on conceptual artwork published on the Internet, the Superman suit took on a more Edward Scissorhands-like (or Borg-like) appearance and apparently served more as a self-healing exoskeleton than as simple clothing. Burton also did not like the flying sequences from the original film and wanted Superman to either travel in a flying Supermobile or be able to teleport from place to place. Details about the plot of the film are a little sketchy at this point, but the latest version of the screenplay by Wesley Strick still involved Superman fighting Brainiac and Lex Luthor, with the two villains merging into a single arch-villain called Lexiac at the film’s conclusion. Handshake deals were rumored to be in place to cast Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, Cameron Diaz as Lois Lane, and either Jim Carrey or Tim Allen as Brianiac.

Not everyone was happy with the direction that the Superman film was taking, however. Nicholas Cage is a diehard comic book fan who wanted to play a much more traditional Superman. He demanded that Superman wear the traditional red and blue costume and be able to fly. He finally got a series of screen tests for the flying sequences in a blue rubber suit. Warner Brothers executives were not altogether thrilled with the screen tests and the shape of the Strick screenplay. They first ordered re-writes of the screenplay by a series of other writers. Not being altogether pleased with those re-writes, they took further action. They looked at the “above the line” costs of the pay-or-play contracts for Burton and Cage, went over the development costs that had accumulated at that point, and examined the expected shooting costs based on the script. In the end, they decided to halt production a few weeks before the film was scheduled to begin shooting in Pittsburgh. Several changes at the executive level at Warner Brothers followed (based in part on the box office failure of Wild Wild West) and development of the Superman movie was further delayed. When the working relationships of the studio with Cage and Burton eventually deteriorated, Cage reportedly quit and Burton was reportedly fired.

Charlie’s Angels director McG as well as Alias and Lost creator J.J. Abrams were involved in the third major unreleased version of the Superman film. Jon Peters hired them both in an effort to start with a clean slate.

The screenplay briefly had passed through the hands of yet more writers and directors after Cage and Burton left. Peters felt that some new creative DNA was needed. Abrams and McG were interested in developing a trilogy of films. To this end, Abram’s initial draft for the script for the first film departed from the traditional Superman concept in several ways:

The planet Krypton does not explode. Jor-El sends Kal-El to earth to escape an invading robot army (similar to Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace) and fulfil a prophecy that Kal-El is the chosen savior of Krypton (similar to The Matrix).
That robot army is lead by Kata-Zor and his son Ty-Zor who turn out to be Jor-El’s brother and nephew.
A series of flying martial arts sequences between Superman, Ty-Zor, and Ty-Zor’s Kryptonian henchmen make up a large portion of the action sequences of the film.
Superman’s suit is alive and lives in a can.
Superman’s first heroic act is to save Air Force One from crashing while he is covering a White House event as Clark Kent. Clark’s adopted father, Jonathan Kent, dies of a heart attack when he hears news of the rescue on the radio.
Superman dies while saving Lois from a trap set by Ty-Zor. Jor-El kills himself in a prison on Krypton and his spirit visits that of his dying son. Jor-El convinces Kal-El’s spirit to return to his body and continue fighting.
Lex Luthor is a CIA agent interested in discovering aliens and alien technology on Earth. It is revealed that he is actually from Krypton at the end of the first film.

Casting proved to be the Achilles Heel of this production team. No one that Peters and McG liked for the role of Superman was willing to join the film. This casting problem inevitably led to production delays that caused scheduling conflicts and creative disagreements. McG and Abrams eventually dropped out of the project, causing Peters to eventually find Bryan Singer to write and direct the version of Superman Returns that will shortly debut on movie screens everywhere. Superman fans can only hope the long road to Superman Returns was worth the trip.