The Buzz: News in Media

 Well we can finally put away all the will he won’t he over whether Bryan Singer will ever get around to making his much promised sequel to Superman Returns. Today he told Empire that he will, and that work is already underway.

All I can say is heck yeah. I loved Superman Returns, it’s a lyrical, nostalgic, beautiful film. The handful of overly loud people who insist on hating it only seem to hate it because they wanted to see Superman punching more things, which sort of misses the point. Those same people have also done a pretty good job of inventing a smear campaign which pushes the completely incorrect notion that the movie was some kind of a flop, a notion which even a lot of Hollywood folk seem to have bought into, though ten seconds on the internet could tell them it’s not even close to true.

Singer has apparently heard some of this malarkey, and responded to it in his Empire interview saying, “That movie made $400 million!" Singer says incredulously. "I don’t know what constitutes under-performing these days.” Me either Singer. But the fact is that Superman Returns made just as much money as Batman Begins, and didn’t actually cost that much more than Bats to make if you play fair and don’t count all the costs the WB incurred trying to get pre-Singer incarnations to happen. Yet everyone things Begins is some sort of smash. It’s ridiculous.

Here’s the facts: Superman Returns earned a lot of money, got stellar reviews, and Bryan Singer is making another one. Another one, which should satisfy the blood curdling cries for violence from some of the bread dead teenage boys out there, while hopefully retaining the lyrical, nostalgic quality which made the first one so goddamn wonderful in the first place. Singer promises, "now that the characters are established, there’s really an opportunity to up the threat levels...Clearly there’ll be a body count [laughs]. From frame one, it will be unrelenting terror! All those teenage girls who found the movie and mooned over James Marsden or Brandon? Well, I’m going to wake them up!” Bring it on Bryan. The world needs a Superman.

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