SUPERMAN RETURNED: WHAT WENT WRONG? PT I- THE BUILDUP

"Remember Brandon Routh from that godawful "Superman" movie? Jesus Christ. Thanks for getting our hopes up and taking a giant s%#t on us."  -Patrick Stewart as "The Narrator" in TED (2012)

PRODUCTION BACKGROUND
By the time SUPERMAN RETURNS came about, the attempt to return Superman to the big screen following financial disaster had already built up an impressively rich and complex history, many elements of which have achieved a bizarre cult status, and contributed to what SUPERMAN RETURNS finally became and even have made their way into the upcoming MAN OF STEEL.
 

Superman's grand screen debut (1978).

Superman has a complicated (and usually disappointing) history in the film industry.  The first Superman movie, quite simply titled, SUPERMAN, was a massive success, financially, critically and culturally.  Through the course of three sequels (four if you count the spun-off SUPERGIRL (1984)), the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind drove out Richard Donner, who directed the first and part of the second films, due to creative and budgetary disagreements, then by the time of the third film, Warner Brothers Studios pressured their own cost-cutting manipulations onto the Salkinds.  After SUPERMAN III (1983) resulted in a negative reaction, the Salkinds sold the Superman film rights to Cannon Films.  Cannon stripped the fourth film down to less than half the originally-conceived budget, and even on its paltry budget, the film was a box

Superman's ignominious franchise death (1987).

office-bomb, critically lambasted and is now used as punchline for dead-in-the-water franchises.
Cannon Films declared bankruptcy, and the Superman rights reverted back to the Salkinds.  When the Death of Superman comics storyline reinvigorated popular interest in the character, Warner Brothers purchased the film rights; what followed throughout the 1990s is the stuff of Hollywood legend.
Four high-profile attempts to develop a new Superman film were initiated and failed; most famously, especially in the Internet Age, was developed as SUPERMAN LIVES.  For SUPERMAN LIVES, Tim Burton, who had directed the enormously successful BATMAN (1989), was paid $5 million up front, just for signing on as director.  CHASING AMY-writer/director Kevin Smith, famously a comics fan, wrote the script according to the specifications of studio executives, and another famous comic book fan, Nicolas Cage, was hired to play Superman and payed up front a sum of $20 million, simply for signing on.  The film was "fast tracked" into production to release the film in Summer 1998, in time for the character's 60th anniversary, and teaser posters were shipped out.  As I mentioned, SUPERMAN LIVES has gained a strong cult interest through the internet as various designs and test shots have made their way to the web, creating retrospective speculation on how the would-be film might have done, usually pessimistically.  Take a gander:

I think this is probably my favorite.

This was probably about the time Nic Cage turned really weird.

I think this was meant to be Superman.  Not sure, though.

Yeah...there's this.

The "Eradicator Suit":  Sort of an Iron Man-esque life support combat suit for the mortally-wounded Superman.  It was filled with weird glowing lights.  Find the test videos on YouTube!

There were numerous screen re-writes as the studio struggled to contain an endlessly-inflating budget, creative talents came and went; the studio basically wanted a big-budget toy commercial on par with the Batman franchise, while art designers, special effects developers, studio executives and Burton all collided over creative differences.  Gradually, the project fell apart as the schedule was continuously delayed further and further, and Burton left to direct SLEEPY HOLLOW after "wasting a year," as he put it.  Warner sought someone who might come in and pick up the pieces, but no one was interested.  After indeterminable expenses amounting over $30 million at least, the project was more or less ended in 2000, when Nicolas Cage officially left the production.
Warner Brothers never really stopped developing a new Superman film through the 1990s and the early 2000s, but the perpetual development went along in stages.  The first had been SUPERMAN REBORN, modeled after The Death of Superman, first begun when Warner bought the rights in 1993, before Kevin Smith was hired, signaling the arrival of SUPERMAN LIVES.  After LIVES fell apart, Akiva Goldsman, writer of BATMAN & ROBIN and A BEAUTIFUL MIND(!) was hired to write BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN, which would cross over the two defunct franchises and be released in 2004, but Warner opted to develop separate new franchises for the two characters.  The last would-be Superman film before SUPERMAN RETURNS stuck was SUPERMAN: FLYBY, a script written by Lost-creator and future STAR TREK (2009)-director J.J. Abrams.  After directors Brett Ratner (RUSH HOUR) and McG (CHARLIE'S ANGELS) both signed on and left in succession, Abrams lobbied for the opportunity to direct his script, but due to his inexperience as a director, Warner sought out X-MEN-director Bryan Singer instead.  Singer brought along his own story concepts and X2: X-MEN UNITED writers, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, who re-wrote the script yet again, this time as SUPERMAN RETURNS.
By the time SUPERMAN RETURNS came around, failed attempts to re-boot the Superman franchise had amounted to estimated costs of around $260 million, and added to that was the production costs of SUPERMAN RETURNS itself, originally planned at $185 million, but rose to a final tally of $209 million (after tax rebates and incentives), plus about $100 million spent on a major marketing campaign.   Although finances in the film industry are a slippery business, with some costs paying off much later with later projects and you can't always tell where expenses wind up, the journey to get SUPERMAN RETURNS to theaters wound up costing an estimated $570 million at least.  Considering that a studio gets about half of a film's total gross (the other half goes to the exhibitors) minus various expenses, SUPERMAN RETURNS would require over $600 million to profit simply as its own production, but well over $1 billion to make up for the unfulfilled productions.  The worldwide gross ended up at $391 million.
For a more economically-budgeted film, that would have been pretty good, and it was the 9th biggest film of 2006; a good, solid success, though nothing spectacular.  However, this was one of the most expensive films ever made, with or without the 1990s baggage, and Warner Brothers went back to the drawing board.

SUPERMAN'S RETURN

Yes he is, Bosworth-Lois, yes he is.

Over the past several years since the Summer 2006 release of SUPERMAN RETURNS, the film has received a negative reputation, but people didn't think it was so bad at the time.  In the United States the film performed very strongly, that is, right up until PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST, a film with a similarly negative reputation, crushed the competition on SUPERMAN RETURNS' second weekend and for a total nine consecutive weeks.  On RottenTomatoes.com, a solid 76% of critics positively reviewed the film, and a decent 67% of audiences rated it positively.
After a nearly 20-year absence from film, SUPERMAN RETURNS became the highest-grossing film in the franchise by far, with an impressive $200 million domestic gross and a worldwide total of $391 million.  SUPERMAN RETURNS was never considered likely to make a profit with the extensive "development hell" expenses were taken into account, but Warner Brothers believed that the film could reignite the franchise and eventually lead to long-term profits through sequels and merchandising that never came.

TO BE CONTINUED...