Latino Review, the first website to tell us that Brandon Routh would play Superman way back in 2004, now breaks the news that the actor will not be back in the cape and tights.
Warner Bros is pressing ahead with plans to make a JUSTICE LEAGUE movie (though the strike may delay the start, according to Anne Thompson at Variety) and the Man of Steel in that film could possibly end up carrying over to the next solo Superman film.
This also signals the end of Bryan Singer’s failed (and costly) attempt to revive the franchise. The next time we see a stand alone Superman film, it’ll likely have nothing to do with the previous movies – a do-over, if you will.
Singer’s movie was a commercial and creative failure – yes, many people like his take on Superman but as a method of restarting a franchise it just doesn’t work. SUPERMAN RETURNS works nicely if you want to position it as the final movie in the Richard Donner saga, but where exactly can you take the characters from there?
Once the JUSTICE LEAGUE film was announced around a year ago it was clear that Singer’s number was up.
I do feel sorry for Brandon Routh, sadly caught up in the crossfire of studio politics. He wasn’t given much opportunity to shine as Superman and the role, which should’ve acted as a career springboard for him, clearly didn’t.
In terms of his career, and the future of the Superman franchise, the best thing both can do is this: rip it up and start again.
Bryan Singer’s next movie VALKYRIE has once again gone through a release date change and will now open on October 3rd 2008.
United Artists decided to push back the feature once it learned that Universal had strategically moved WANTED from it’s March opening to June 27th, the same weekend as VALKYRIE and Pixar’s WALL-E.
Not wanting to be part of a three way battle against two bid budgeted movies, the film will now open against Guy Ritchie’s gangster movie RocknRolla (by then, 8 years since Ritchie’s last commercial success) and the Sony comedy NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST, starring SUPERBAD’s Michael Cera.
Personally, I didn’t think they needed to worry too much about WANTED but certainly WALL-E was a worry for them. This October release would now seem to make more sense not only because of its competition but also because of the climate of films during that period.
This is more of a serious drama/thriller, and opening at this point should see it win over a certain type of crowd that it wouldn’t in the Summer entertainment season.
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA has taken away your Summer 2009 tentpole release for SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF STEEL and hack director Gus Van Sant may have taken away your chances of filming a Harvey Milk biopic.
Coming Soon have the press release from Focus Features which state that Sean Penn will star as the openly gay 70’s politician Harvey Milk who was gunned down by Dan White, a fellow electoral supervisor in Van Sant’s movie MILK… which will begin production in January.
This beats out Singer who is still on post-production on VALKYRIE and because of the writer’s strike, he is likely to be no-where near ready for his MILK biopic to roll next year. A shame because I would much prefer to see Singer’s version of this tale, especially with him being so desperate for so very long to make it.
It does look however as if there is some bad news for Van Sant. Matt Damon has had to pull out of the picture, like we all expected he would as his pre-strike movie at this time is an adaptation of the war drama IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY which he will be shooting early next year with his BOURNE director Paul Greengrass.
So where does this leave Bryan Singer then?
He can’t now do SUPERMAN as his next film as he chose to do VALKYRIE instead. He can’t do his MILK biopic for the same reason (although he can, but history suggests that the latter movie about the same subject NEVER succeeds, no matter how good it is).
He can’t write or change any script that has not been turned in.
Instead he probably has to sit and wait until the damn strike is over, or get tapped up to direct a script a studio needs a director for?
Let’s hope VALKYRIE is as awesome as it looks to be, because Singer is in need of some good news lately.
I can’t wait for this movie, the script is amazing (although the ending is something of a cop out) and I’m a big fan of Cruise and, Superman Returns aside, Bryan Singer is a great director who’s been stuck playing in the franchise toy box for a bit too long.
One thing I’d been wondering about is the use of accents. Would the cast speak with German accents or go English?
In any event, a U.K. projectionist has watched the trailer for the WWII thriller, which concerns a German military plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler with Tom Cruise playing ringleader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, and say it’s “fairly gripping.” He adds no one in the cast is speaking with a German accent a la Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. “All of the [mostly British] cast members use their own accents,” he says. “Kenneth Branagh sounds English. And Cruise just sounds American, although maybe he’s softened it a bit to sound more English.”
That’s a smart move if you ask me. The German accent is quite aggressive and serious and there’s nothing wrong with it, yet whenever a Brit or American actor puts it on I just can’t take them seriously at all. Comedy Nazis would definitely kill the tension in this film.
Generally an audience can accept what’s going on if the cast are all uniform in dialect and English is probably the best way to go. Exceptions to the rule are Oliver Stone’s Alexander cast, who all seemed to be Irish, and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood who was…. well I don’t what he was trying to do!
This might just be the first of many much needed steps if Superman is to make it back to our screens as a solo character.
Variety say that the writers of Superman Returns will not return for the next installment in the franchise, as they are pursuing their newly formed directorial careers. Their names are Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, both of whom have big movies behind the camera on the horizon… I Lucifer (Harris), Trick R’ Treatk (Dougherty).
The duo had formed a nice relationship with Bryan Singer who they had also worked with on X-Men 2, but this will give Singer and WB a chance to try something a little fresh for the next film which wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.
Variety claim some insiders believe the next Superman film will do a ‘Hulk” and forget the last film ever happened and will break away from the continuity that was continued in the last movie and will just start a fresh. That may not be a bad idea at all (they should have done that in the first place) but trying to implement that when the audience will already be confused by a new Superman anyway in the Justice League of America movie, this maybe quite difficult.
So obviously attention turns to Christopher McQuarrie, the guy who wrote The Usual Suspects and next year’s Valkyrie. If he’s a comic book fan, then he would seem to be the obvious choice at this point.
Hopefully they won’t go for someone like David Goyer, who I do like, but I’m sick of seeing his work on every superhero project under the sun.
Big changes are needed for the next Superman film. This is the first good step… let’s hope they find a hungry writer with a new take on the character.
LOGAN’s RUN is one of those films I’ve never been totally familiar with. I watched it one lazy Sunday afternoon but wasn’t really paying much attention. That’s no slight on the film, I just wasn’t in the mood to engage with it and it was more an “on in the background” kind of thing. I did remember perking up after seeing Jenny Agutter’s breasts (way before the watershed, too, that’s Channel 5 for you!), though!
I was excited to see Bryan Singer’s version, the concept is fascinating and I’m always game to see well executed science fiction films. Unfortunately, SUPERMAN RETURNS left Singer burnt out and with the disappointing box office take for that movie I think Warner Bros felt it best if LOGAN’s RUN changed hands. Joel Silver has been driving the project for a few years now and Timothy Sexton (CHILDREN OF MEN) is working on a script for Joseph Kosinski to direct.
It’s worth noting that LOGAN’s wasn’t on the pre-strike list that circulated a while back so don’t expect to see it in the next couple of years.
If you’re a fan of the original movie then head on over to Back Row Chatter to read Patrick’s excellent in depth article on the Chris McQuarrie script that Bryan Singer intended to shoot. Here’s an excerpt from the review:-
“The script opens at some unspecified time in the future. We’re told that technology has been able to make the world a near utopia and as a result the population soars. Without any prior warning a massive supervolcanic event takes place in Yellowstone National Park, destroying the majority of the North American continent and plunging the world underneath a global sheet of ash clouds. There’s a chilling image that McQuarrie on just the fourth page as we watch a lone astronaut in orbit above the Earth watching the dark cloud spread across the planet, the image he’s witnessing reflected in his helmet’s visor. Planet Earth: Lastday.
“In the next moment we are introduced to Logan 5, a 20-year-old elite Sandman, the best of the best. Logan and his best friend, fellow Sandman Francis-7 (19 years of age) are taking down runners and the last one they’re chasing after is named Doyle-4. They discover to their surprise that Doyle’s lifeclock (the crystal on his palm) isn’t being picked up by their scans, something that shouldn’t be possible. After a harrowing pursuit where the runner and Sandmen use “vators” (like the cars in the ‘76 movie but they can go anywhere, even straight up), Doyle commits suicide by throwing himself from the vehicle—and it’s here that we discover that Logan and everyone he knows live inside a 20-mile long cylinder. Remember playing Halo for the first time and being able to look “up” and see the ring continuing on up and into the sky? That’s kind of what it’s like for Logan as he watches Doyle float in weighlessness and then start to increase in velocity as he falls down to the other side of the “world”. It should be plainly evident at this stage in the movie that Logan’s world isn’t anywhere on Earth.”
It looks like McQuarrie and Singer tried to broaden the scope of the movie and with modern effects technology it could have been truly breathtaking. If the film gets made in its latest incarnation I’ll be curious to see if it bares a resemblance to this script.
The case of the Siegel family vs. Time Warner has been rumbling on for a few years and now it looks like it’ll finally go to trial in January next year according to Back Row Chatter.
For those who aren’t familiar with the story, essentially the widow of Superman creator Jerry Siegel is suing the Warner empire (who hold the rights to the character through DC Comics) for 50% of both the Superman and Superboy copyright.
SUPERMAN RETURNS director Bryan Singer is required to give a deposition to the court presiding over the case – some speculate this might be one of the reasons why THE MAN OF STEEL hasn’t happened yet.
I don’t know why Singer is needed at the trial; after all he’s just a hired gun working for a studio and has had no real say in the character’s creation. If anything, Richard Donner should be in court as he, and the writers behind SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, are responsible for creating the contemporary Superman. Singer’s Superman was pretty much the same as Donner’s except his feinted more.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the Kevin McClory Bond lawsuits that went on and on. All that ended with McClory’s death last year and just like that case, I can’t see the underdogs toppling the corporate behemoth.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were young and naive when they created Superman and not much older and none the wiser when they sold their stake in the character to DC. They gave over their rights so I’m not sure how exactly these claims of 50% copyright ownership have any weight.
If Siegel’s family come away victorious from this case then they can expect to receive millions in compensation and possibly get royalties from any future Superman comic, movie or TV show.
Valkrie hasn’t had the smoothest of shoots up to now. The German government initially didn’t want to play ball with the filmmakers due to star Tom Cruise’s religious beliefs (I would put those words in inverted commas but I’d fear being made fair game) and an accident on set left several extras injured.
Now, however, it seems the film has gotten a much needed stroke of luck. The German Ministry of Defence has granted permission for the Bryan Singer helmed film to shoot at the famous Bendlerblock military building.
The location is pretty integral to the story as it’s not only where the German conspirators came together and hatched their plan to assassinate Hitler, but also where the same conspiritors are executed by Nazi firing squads.
I picked this story up via Hollywood Elsewhere and site editor Jeffrey Wells makes a good point by saying he hopes Singer doesn’t chicken out in the execution scene. It’s not that I dislike Cruise and have the subconcious desire to see his body viciously shredded by bullets, but this movie needs that scene to go the distance if it’s to have any impact.
I can happily watch a Cruise film and divorce myself from his bizarre private life, I enjoy him onscreen and think he’s a great moviestar, but the general movie going public see him as Tom Cruise the indestructable A-lister. Hence I put it to you that it would be a shocking jar to the audience to see Cruise get a brutal and spectacular death.
From what I know about this film and from what’s been in the script, as the orders are given to fire the camera cranes away and into the sky as air raid sirens blare out over Germany.
Anyone who’s studied World War II in school knows how this story ends – so Singer needs to throw out subtlety and ambiguity and go with the nasty ending before the final fade to black.
Michael Dougherty, the co-writer of the next Superman movie has revealed what we already guessed before, that their will be two villains in The Man of Steel, one of which we already know will be Kevin Spacey again as Lex Luthor. Although sounding a little hesitant on the topic, he also reassured us that the sequel will be out by the summer of 2009, which probably just goes to show that Warner Brothers don’t even know what Bryan Singer wants to do.
Whoever the villain is, it has to be a kick ass alien hell bent on killing Superman and not neccesarily taking over the world. He has to be someone who comes off as being unstoppable and not some ‘business suit’ villain’. We need more action, less romance and less of Lois Lane for a change.
Let’s pray the second villain of the piece won’t once again be Bryan Singer.
Latino Review, the first website to tell us that Brandon Routh would play Superman way back in 2004, now breaks the news that the actor will not be back in the cape and tights.
The case of the Siegel family vs. Time Warner has been rumbling on for a few years and now it looks like it’ll finally go to trial in January next year according to 
