Originally Posted by
Simon Brew, Den of Geek
So where exactly is the next Superman film? Nowhere in sight, appears to be the answer. For a while, it seemed that Bryan Singer would be re-attached, and while nobody has come out and said that he won't be doing another Superman movie, Warner Bros has clearly hardly been beating a path to his door to do it. The reason? The underwhelming word of mouth that the last film garnered. It actually did similar numbers to Batman Begins too at the US box office, and yet many were left wondering several things. Where's the action? Why are you being quite so reverential to the earlier films? What's this silly plot all about?
Personally, I quite liked it (and to be fair to Singer, when he stages an action sequence, such as the landing of the aircraft, it's something to behold), but Superman Returns nonetheless failed to ignite fresh passion in the franchise. But still, the initial thought was that enough money was in the bank to press ahead with another film.
And then Warner Bros wobbled. It had originally announced that the film would indeed be arriving in the midst of 2009's summer blockbuster season, and that Bryan Singer was pencilled in to return to the director's chair. The initial thought was that Brainiac and Bizarro were possible villains for the story, and that the action quotient would be ramped right up too. In fact, all of the key cast were also primed to return, too.
Thus, the story work began, and yet it seemed to be taking longer than originally planned. Then, Singer decided to go off and film the Tom Cruise-headliner Valkyrie, and the word was that filming would start in the middle of 2008. At the end of 2007, though, writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty left the project, and the writers' strike in America made it problematic to quickly bring in fresh faces. Warner Bros decided to delay the project to 2010, as a result.
But then talk surfaced that Warner Bros was looking, effectively, to reboot the reboot. Comics star Mark Millar commented that he'd approached Warner Bros with such a plan, after saying that an unnamed yet well-known director had asked him to help him come up with a pitch. Millar was looking to do a trilogy of pictures, but it's understood that by this stage in 2008, Warner Bros was listening to ideas from many writers, none of whom it appears has yet given the studio the magic bullet that it seeks.
It was in the summer of 2008 that it finally, publicly, voiced its thoughts on Superman Returns and its search for a follow-up. "'Superman' didn't quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to," Warner Bros Pictures group president Jeff Rubinov told the Wall Street Journal. "It didn't position the character the way he needed to be positioned. Had 'Superman' worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009 ... But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all."