Bryan Singer’s 2006 movie Superman Returns is infamous. A lukewarm, direct follow-up to a 30-year-old superhero franchise from none of the same creative team feels like an idea out of the 2020s, not the 2000s. Returns did halfway decent business in theatrical release, with a $390 million international box-office take. That wasn’t bad enough to call it a flop, but wasn’t good enough to warrant a sequel — especially not after Singer hugely overran his budget on a troubled production. Warner Bros. moved on to reboot Superman with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, and the rest is history.
And yet. With James Gunn’s Superman on the horizon, I’m inevitably thinking about one of my favorite Superman movies, one that stirs my emotions and gets my heart going pitter-pat every time I return to watch it. I’m not embarrassed about this, because I’m right.
Not Superman Returns itself — hell no. I’m talking about the first teaser trailer for Superman Returns.
I don’t know what studio grunt edited this trailer together back in the mid-aughts, but Great Scott! The shot compositions! Sunrise over the Kent mailbox! Young Clark Kent leaping through a Kansas cornfield! The expert timing of it all, interwoven with Marlon Brando’s voice and John Williams’ music!
It’s a minute and a half long, the first 20 seconds are just logos, and it’s still a work of art.
This can only barely be attributed to the actual movie Superman Returns. What makes the trailer’s array of footage work, emotionally, rests 99.9% on the shoulders of one of the most universally acclaimed actors and most universally acclaimed film composers of the 20th century, and a suite of screenwriters whose work includes The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, and Kramer vs. Kramer. The recombination of Brando’s Fortress of Solitude monologue, recut for brevity and impact, with the opening of Williams’ “The Planet Krypton” from Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman? That bird would still sing if it were played over footage of paint drying.
In bringing this up while people are still picking apart every second of the teaser for James Gunn’s Superman, I’m not trying to suggest that Gunn’s movie could beef it as bad as Superman Returns, where poor Brandon Routh does his best to play absentee father Superman in a sympathetic way. I’m just thinking about how it isn’t hard to cut a bad Superman movie into an all-time great trailer — and I think that’s because of Superman himself.
Even though he’s often eclipsed in pop culture by more stylish guys like Batman or Spider-Man, Superman has never completely left the public consciousness since his 1938 debut. That’s because the basic idea of him, and the standard imagery associated with him, are so tremendously iconic and moving. His comics can inspire great artists — like Brando, Williams, Donner, Christopher Reeve, and Margot Kidder — to make great work. And when that work is cut together just right… it can elevate other material to heights it might not deserve on its own.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Superman inspires Gunn to do in his movie, and his take on the DC Universe. Especially when he’s already giving Williams’ Superman theme the trailercore treatment — he’s playing the same tunes as the Superman Returns teaser, literally and figuratively. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a great sign.
But while I’m waiting for Gunn’s movie, I won’t forget the lesson that 2006 teaser taught me: We shouldn’t be swayed by the siren song of John Williams. The real proof is in the pudding, and the pudding doesn’t hit theaters until July.
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