In 1998, five years after Warner Bros. was so enthusiastic about developing a new superman film, the studio closed the production offices of “Superman Lives”. At this point, the conceptions had been finalized, the costumes created and even the games built. Tim Burton had chosen Pittsburgh as the basis of his metropolis, and the scenario was finally in a place where Warners, Peters and the toy companies were quite satisfied. So what was the last nail in the coffin? Well, there were several elements at stake beyond the already troubled production.
“Batman & Robin”, a film that Kevin Feige thinks is one of the most important comic book films ever made, arrived in 1998 at a bad reception of fans and criticism. Joel Schumacher’s extended toys advertised the derision and seemed to have killed the Batman franchise for good. This did not exactly inspire confidence in Warner Bros., which adopted a similar “Toyetic” approach with his film Superman. What could be more, the end of the 90s saw Warners adopting a safer approach to the creation of films, with co-president Terry Semel announcing that the studio would avoid “event” films and focus on the price mid-bun in an attempt to, well, do not go bankrupt-I know that you think that the worst is finished for Warner Bros. listen? The long -term Superman film simply did not correspond to this image.
Meanwhile, it seems that even after Wesley Strick worked his magic on the script, the leaders were still not completely convinced. At that time, the scenario had been so reworked that the budget had already exceeded any reasonable point, and like the co-president of Warner Bros., Bob Daly, said it (via “the biggest science fiction films never made”), “we did not have a script that we helped, and that the budget was too high. When the budget started to take control.
In the memory of Strick, however, Semel read his script and “reacted violently against her”. According to the writer, there was “a level of nervousness and second motto” surrounding the project throughout his development, which essentially assured that Warners would never be completely comfortable with a script. In this sense, “Superman lives”, a bit like “The Flash” and his horrible cameo Nic Cage, was somehow condemned from the start.
