Superman Could Get Dark Knight Treatment

[Katana314]

THERE'S A BOMB ABOUT TO HIT THE CITY
Super-strength, toss into ocean.
THERE'S 15 BOMBS ABOUT TO HIT THE CITY
Super-strength plus super speed, get all of them in under a second.
THERE'S A BOMB THAT IS ACTIVELY EXPLODING THE CITY'S UNDERGROUND!
Ice breath puts it out.
THERE ARE 500 BILLION MACHINE GUNS AIMED SQUARELY AT SUPERMAN!
Calmly walk over while being shot at, take their guns, pick them up, put them in jail.
THERE IS KRYPTONITE.
Die.

I have just summarized everything that will or can happen in the Superman movie. This is why Superman is uninteresting and Batman is awesome.

 

[Weaver]

I just don't like superman, he's a lame character.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I think when they say "Dark Knight Treatment" they mean they want Nolan to use the same magic he used to make Batman Begins and Dark Knight successful, not necessarily make Superman dark and angsty.

 

[tmujir955]

Here is a dark and brooding Superman. An example of what you don't want to do.

 

[Dr Happypills]

Grant Morrison's All Star Superman features a Superman more powerful than pretty much any since his Silver Age days in the 60's, and it is balls to the wall fantastic.

Also, more on Doomsday and The Death of Superman; Doomsday came about because the current writers had no idea what to do with Superman, so they joked "let's just kill him". No one objected, so they did. It was an excuse for Dan Jurgens to draw an entire miniseries worth of fight scenes and destruction, pretty awesome in it's own right, and it gave way to the Reign of the Supermen and Funeral for a Friend arcs, which were interesting explorations of possible Superman changes. In the end none of them had long term appeal and Supes was brought back in a pretty cool way. Pretty good comics.

So The Death of Superman was pretty good. Doomsday on the other hand has completely floundered since then (apart from two pretty good appearences in Hunter/Prey and... something else I can't remember) because once you've killed Superman there's really no where to go from there. Darkseid is infinitely more interesting then him and already fills the role of "guy who can go toe to toe with Superman". Ditto for Metallo and depending on the incarnation, Brainiac works for that too.

Anyway, they already made an adaptation of the Death and Return/Reign arc and it was... Ok. I doubt they'd repeat it so soon.

 

[SyphonX]

I personally could care less what they do. Well, honestly I'll probably find the new adaptation interesting. All the other Superman movies sucked, I just couldn't stomach them. Just couldn't put my finger on it, I just didn't like them, and I'm not about to watch them again to figure out what the one thing is... especially the newest one.

 

[thenamelessloser]

I don't read the Superman comics, but the DC animated universe (DCAU) Superman was done well. He could be a bit of a jerk sometimes, wasn't simply a boyscout, but still wouldn't kill and generally still not all dark and mysterious like Batman.. His character evolved over time and I'm not sure if a movie could do the changes in character in the way a series could... But Lex Luther didn't really do anything to provoke him compared to Darkseid in the cartoon. The last final episodes of Superman were AWESOME.

Or just maybe Darksied was awesome in it and is biasing my perspective... I just want a New Gods movie... (even though I only really know about them from DCAU...

 

[Covarr]

I don't see why people are worried that this'll be dark and gritty. The reason Batman was that way is because THAT'S THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF BATMAN. Nolan didn't do that because he thought it would make a good movie, he did it because he thought it would make a good Batman movie. He's smart enough to keep Superman the way it should be: lighthearted.

I, for one, liked Superman Returns, and I loved the camp value of the older ones. I can understand wanting to take it a bit more seriously than that, but most importantly they need to not give Superman a kid. That was Returns' biggest failing point.

If it has Lex Luthor in it, his scheme needs to involve real estate. Even if it's not a continuation of any of the previous movies, his single reused plan (blow up the coast, sell the new one at a high price) has become a tradition for Big-Screen-Superman.

P.S. Thanks

 

[letsnoobtehpwns]

Ummm.... Why would they want to do this? It's nice having a super hero that doesn't listen to My Chemical Romance.

 

[SmugFrog]

The only way I'm going to consider this a re-anything for Superman is if Nolan makes him Latino, actually kills him off, or includes a live-action Justice League movie as part of the deal.

I can't read that and not think about Family Guy and the "Mexican Superman" clip.

You have to admit that calling Batman Begins a "reboot" is the best way to describe fixing a superhero that Hollywood was destroying. It annoys my wife that I won't acknowledge the previous Batman movies (except the one with Adam West - that one was so horrible it's funny). When I speak of the Batman movies, The Dark Knight is the "second" one.

But no one likes Superman. Case in point:

Awesome.

 

[faceless chick]

Two things:

2) Granted, 20 years ago they weren't like this, but they weren't that successful or, you know, good, either. I absolutely love the first Batman movie, but there are a few things in it that haven't aged well at all, and if you go further back it just gets ridiculous. I guess I'm just not a fan of laughing at movies instead of with movies, but to me Iron Man is the perfect balance point between embracing the notion of superheroes and not throwing me off the movie with impossibly cheesy stuff that doesn't make any sense.

Oh, and for the record, Watchmen came out 24 years ago, and Frank Miller started his Daredevil run on 1979. The whole "realistic superhero" thing is older than most people think.

and why do you think they were successful?
because they were different.
cheesiness makes a lot of shows successful as well, as long as those shows aren't like everything else.

but when everything is either cheesy or gritty and "realistic" it loses all charm.
that's the reason i'm so against them making everything like batman -it's killing both series and really...superheroes ARE cheesy, and trying to make them serious is even stupider.

the new batman movies are just cop movies with an idiot wearing a halloween costume. take that out and it's a normal movie. it has so little to do with "batman" it could've been called anything else and still be the exact same movie, but of course they needed to appeal to a bigger fanbase to make more bucks.

but what about superman? black might be an ok color, but red and blue spandex with the underwear over it?and a guy that flies and shoots lasers out of his eyes?
and they're trying to say this is going to be realistic?

unless they change it completely- thus making this NOT a superman movie- there is no way they can pull this off.
and then it's just going to suck, no matter how well the movie is done- because if i go to a superman movie, i don't want to see die hard just as much as going to see spiderman i don't want to see twilight.

 

[Enzeru92]

I trust the Director because of the movies he has made (which i also liked ) but Superman I don't Know its just doesn't seem right

 

[Katana314]

Superman because he's an embodiment of pure unadulturated, frontal assault, spectacluar ass-kicking and power (like a Rampaging Elephant). In short, he's an ideal version of man

My opinion MAY be a minority, but if our hero is surrounded by 800 sword-wielding mooks, I'd rather see an awesome 5-minute sword fight than just a millisecond pulse of pure energy that turns them all to dust. Being able to do things like that isn't an "ideal version of man" because it's not MAN at all. It's hardly relatable to the audience, who is human and do not have any magic phlebotinum. Superman can do those things because he has magic powers. Batman can do those things because he's good at a believable level.

For example, if I said my character, Blasty McAwesome, could destroy anything in the universe, mind-control everyone, will never commit a single evil whatsoever, can exist on multiple planes at once, and has absolutely no weaknesses, you'd honestly get pretty bored.

It's really not just the "dark" aspects Batman has to him. We could see a multi-colored joke-cracking asskicker who fights in the daytime with no superpowers and using the world around him, and he'd be just as cool. Like Jackie Chan (in any movie).

 

[Styphax]

If you want to make a good Superman movie, then look no further than All Star Superman. If you'd like to expand the universe of that, then add in a hefty scoop of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and the stuff that Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, and James Robinson have been doing for the last couple of years, and you have a franchise that will kick so much ass. Superman can do gritty, you just have to do it right. IE: Don't give him a problem that he can punch away. His character has to be challenged. Right now he is the only Kryptonian on a world of Kryptonians that has any Humanity. Spiderman fans should be eating that up. As far as Nolan goes, I liked the new Batmen movies as much as any comic fan, but I don't know how DC plans on having a unified universe in the Nolan-verse. I would suggest making them another world in the Multiverse and pulling a Hulk, and make another Batman tangentially related to the old bat-verse, but one not so dependent on Realism.