League of Melbotis

Summer of Superman: Not a hoax, not a dream....

No matter how bad Superman Returns may be as a film upon it's release June 28thish, The League will still be happy to know that they tried. It's been a long time in the works, this movie, and there have been innumerable directors, casts, budgets and plotlines associated with the film. 95% of those rumors and ideas had The League totally freaked out.

Imagine, if you will, an all new Superman movie directed by Mr. Slow-Mo McG, starring Justin Timberlake as Superman and Cameron Diaz as Lois Lane, in which Krypton never exploded and Superman spends the duration of the movie learning that he is the prophesized "chosen one", destined to save Krypton. Leaguers, this movie almost happened.

Or a Superman who has no powers, but derives them from kick ass body armor, and who weilds knives...

Or a middle-aged Nick Cage in a hair piece in the supersuit, exploring the "darker" aspects of Superman with Tim Burton?

Ashton Kutscher "dude-ing" his way through the movie as a cross-eyes Clark Kent (am I the only one who ever noticed Kutscher is cross-eyed)?

Beyonce Knowles as Lois Lane?

Brett "I Have No Idea How to Structure a Movie" Ratner trying to re-tell the origin?

Lex Luthor as a Kryptonian FBI agent?

And this is going to irritate some people, but Kevin Smith's script is pretty bad. I don't care how many copies of "An Evening with Kevin Smith" he's sold, his feel for the material is clunky at best, and sort of comes off like an episode of SuperFriends with violence.

I'm not sure what relationship producer Jon Peters now has with the project, but it was interesting to see the guy who had held the purse strings for so long appear in the recent documentary "Look! Up in the Sky!" admitting he had no idea what Superman was about for years and years of development.

It could have been a very goofy/bad movie indeed that never even tried to live up to the legacy. It could have been a hack job by a bunch of people who thought the movie just wasn't a good idea in the first place.

Thank goodness, then, for Avi Arad understanding the potential for a serious comic movie franchise, Bryan Singer and his X-Men movies, Sam Raimi and Spider-Man, and the Salkinds and Richard Donner for showing us nearly thirty years ago the way it can and should be done.

For the whole, ugly history, go here.