Oh god the lack of paragraph breaks. Here, I’ll fix it.
This is how you do a Superman movie:
Cast Jon Hamm as Superman, Tina Fey as Lois Lane, and Billy Zane as Lex Luthor. Base the score on Sammy Timberg’s theme music from the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons instead of John William’s score for the 1978 film.
Set the first act in the 1940’s. Superman defeats some boilerplate retro-futuristic plot by Lex Luthor to steal all the gold from Fort Knox using remote control robots or something.
At the end of the first act, Lex Luthor sends Superman forward in time seventy years. Lois Lane is dead. The Daily Planet is defunct. The country, and the world, has been without a Superman for the past seven decades. It is jaded and corrupt. Superman is a fish out of water, his idealism and his wholesomeness anachronistic and ridiculous.
Lex Luthor is still alive thanks to scientific advancements in the field of medicine funded by LexCorp. He is a combination of Rupert Murdoch/Koch Brothers/The Smoking Man from the X-Files. He’s spent the past seventy years preparing for Superman’s return by using his absolute control over the media to paint him as one of the great villains of history whose return is to be dreaded.
The conflict: Can Superman expose Luthor’s behind-the-scenes reign of corruption and convince a cynical, apathetic, technology overstimulated public to believe in Truth, Justice and the American Way again? Or are those things, and by extension Superman himself, no longer relevant in this day and age?
Twist ending: He can’t, and they’re not. The country is too far gone, the people’s hope and sense of moral outrage too long dead, Luthor’s influence is too ubiquitous. The only recourse if for Superman to travel back in time and prevent this timeline from ever occurring.
To do this, he enlists the aid of a geriatric Jimmy Olsen, who reveals he managed to steal a piece of Luthor’s time travel technology when he briefly worked for LexCorp in the 1960’s and has been saving it all this time. “I never stopped believing,” he tells him.
Superman travels back to the 1940’s, reappearing mere moments before Luthor sent him forward and interupting him mid-maniacal laugh with a knockout punch, rescuse Lois, returns to work at The Daily Planet, and begins working on an editorial titled “The Superman in All Of Us.” As the camera pulls away, he sits at his typewriter, speaking the words aloud as he types: “There are threats far greater than errant asteroids, far more insidious than mad scientists, far subtler than invading armies. I refer to the all-too-human traits of cynicism, apathy, and credulousness, and especially to those entities that would seek to exploit those traits for their own ends: unscrupulous corporations, power hungry politicians, and fanatical zealots of any race, faith, creed, or stripe. To combat these forces, we must appeal not to some omnipotent and external savior but to the Superman in all of us…”
His words fade out as the camera continues pulling back and out through a window, where it tracks down the side of the building to the street below, where the citizens of Metropolis walk with verve and purpose, greeting each other with warmth and civility, their faces filled with optimism and hope: The way were were. The way we should be. The way we can be again.
As for the marketing campagin: a series of posters and billboards depicting bank heists, natural disasters, alien invasions, etc., and written across the bottom line in lieu of a logo or a title or an actor or a director’s name is simply the phrase “This looks like a job for…” followed by a release date.]
![tzikeh:
Click the pic for bigger version.
Oh god the lack of paragraph breaks. Here, I’ll fix it.
This is how you do a Superman movie:
Cast Jon Hamm as Superman, Tina Fey as Lois Lane, and Billy Zane as Lex Luthor. Base the score on Sammy Timberg’s theme music from the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons instead of John William’s score for the 1978 film.
Set the first act in the 1940’s. Superman defeats some boilerplate retro-futuristic plot by Lex Luthor to steal all the gold from Fort Knox using remote control robots or something.
At the end of the first act, Lex Luthor sends Superman forward in time seventy years. Lois Lane is dead. The Daily Planet is defunct. The country, and the world, has been without a Superman for the past seven decades. It is jaded and corrupt. Superman is a fish out of water, his idealism and his wholesomeness anachronistic and ridiculous.
Lex Luthor is still alive thanks to scientific advancements in the field of medicine funded by LexCorp. He is a combination of Rupert Murdoch/Koch Brothers/The Smoking Man from the X-Files. He’s spent the past seventy years preparing for Superman’s return by using his absolute control over the media to paint him as one of the great villains of history whose return is to be dreaded.
The conflict: Can Superman expose Luthor’s behind-the-scenes reign of corruption and convince a cynical, apathetic, technology overstimulated public to believe in Truth, Justice and the American Way again? Or are those things, and by extension Superman himself, no longer relevant in this day and age?
Twist ending: He can’t, and they’re not. The country is too far gone, the people’s hope and sense of moral outrage too long dead, Luthor’s influence is too ubiquitous. The only recourse if for Superman to travel back in time and prevent this timeline from ever occurring.
To do this, he enlists the aid of a geriatric Jimmy Olsen, who reveals he managed to steal a piece of Luthor’s time travel technology when he briefly worked for LexCorp in the 1960’s and has been saving it all this time. “I never stopped believing,” he tells him.
Superman travels back to the 1940’s, reappearing mere moments before Luthor sent him forward and interupting him mid-maniacal laugh with a knockout punch, rescuse Lois, returns to work at The Daily Planet, and begins working on an editorial titled “The Superman in All Of Us.” As the camera pulls away, he sits at his typewriter, speaking the words aloud as he types: “There are threats far greater than errant asteroids, far more insidious than mad scientists, far subtler than invading armies. I refer to the all-too-human traits of cynicism, apathy, and credulousness, and especially to those entities that would seek to exploit those traits for their own ends: unscrupulous corporations, power hungry politicians, and fanatical zealots of any race, faith, creed, or stripe. To combat these forces, we must appeal not to some omnipotent and external savior but to the Superman in all of us…”
His words fade out as the camera continues pulling back and out through a window, where it tracks down the side of the building to the street below, where the citizens of Metropolis walk with verve and purpose, greeting each other with warmth and civility, their faces filled with optimism and hope: The way were were. The way we should be. The way we can be again.
As for the marketing campagin: a series of posters and billboards depicting bank heists, natural disasters, alien invasions, etc., and written across the bottom line in lieu of a logo or a title or an actor or a director’s name is simply the phrase “This looks like a job for…” followed by a release date.]](http://www.frodobooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/02xuM.png)
