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Originally posted by Dr. Zaius
All right, now that WB has wheeled out their abysmal Superman Returns, I'm going to respectfully submit to them a few ideas for the next reboot, whenever or if ever that occurs.

The key interest of the Superman story is the character's christological resonance. He's an all-powerful messiah who's also an emotional orphan and literal castaway from another world. In my own opinion, the key to doing any effective Superman story is to tap into this powerful messiah/orphan idea. How do you do this? Write stories that involve Superman discovering things about and coming into conflict with his Kryptonian heritage. Of course, this also involves Supes balancing his alien identity as Kal-El with his Kansas, farm-boy upbringing and earth-bound relationships with Lois and his parents. This is very rich ground to mine.

The problem: for all intents and purposes, Supes is God. How do you write interesting stories or introduce credible threats, when you have a character that can literally throw a Manhatten sized island into space? Short of having his square off against Jesus at the Second Coming, you don't have many options. That is, unless you want to dredge up the whole Kryptonite thing and sap Superman's strength. But this gets old and defeats the purpose of having a powerful character. Here's a sure-fire litmus test. If you're writing a Superman screenplay and come to the point where you have to produce a credible threat/conflict for Supes, you know you're imaginatively tapped out when you wheel in the old Kryptonite wild card. Avoid using this cop-out at all costs.

That being said, I think that there are only 3 possible movie options for doing a Superman movie that both stay true to the interesting aspects of the character and create a great enough menace for there to be an actual story.

1) Create a Lex Luthor that is more Hannibal Lector than Hannibal from the A-Team. In other words, make a Luthor that is malevolent, aloof, and brilliant. Don't let the character participate in petty con-games or swindles. His intellect should be large enough to create a sense of real menace and only permit him to dabble in schemes that aspire to a cosmic scale. Any story involving Luthor should depict him stealing Kryptonian tech to conquer the world and kill Supes. This much the movie got right. Its just too bad they didn't have Lex do anything interesting with the tech once he got it. A brilliant, maniacal Luthor armed with Kryptonian weaponry--that's a menace.

2) Use other Kryptonian surviors from the Phantom Zone to take Supes on. Unfortunately, this idea has already been played out in Superman II.

3) Here's one that hasn't been tried yet. Let Luthor break into the Fortress of Solitude and, wittingly or unwittingly, unleash a dormant Kryptonian artificial intelligence. Have the A.I. assemble a crystaline body for itself, one powerful enough to take on Supes. Just don't call this entity Braniac (or make him look like Braniac, for that matter). The angle for this story is that the A.I is the last repository of Kryptonian knowledge and memory. It first seems friendly and benign. It naturally wants to ally itself with Kal-El the last survivor of Krypton. However, when the entity reveals its less than sympathetic view of earth and its inhabitants, or seeks to exercise some culturally aggressive Kryptonian protocol, Superman is forced to stop it. What's great about this story, is that you can literally have Superman come to blows with his own cultural legacy and decide once and for all whether he is human or Kryptonian.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Does anybody else have any ideas on this? Maybe we can compile a list of the best story ideas and e-mail them to W.B. along with a threat to hunger strike if they don't hire better screen writers.

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Originally posted by redcaped
Please be quiet for a moment and listen to this. Why is it that I see nothing about what the movie has collected...one day has passed!

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Originally posted by roughrider
It's time to retire Lex Luthor as the villain. Everytime he comes up, he sets a kryptonite trap for Supes, Supes gets help from someone to get out of it, and Luthor ceases being any threat. People have seen epic fights in other comic-to-film adaptations - it's time to bring out big threats, like Darkseid and the New Gods ( Supes gets an ally in Orion), Doomsday and others. Stop using kryptonite as a crutch for defeat.

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Originally posted by NPC
The sequel to SR-
You have some flashbacks showing supes deep space adventure, meeting some aliens(warworld) kickin some alien arse.(Mongol)
Running into Lobo an thru all those alien interactions becoming known to Darksied thru the grapevine.
Have Darksied lookin for powerful recruits to help him defeat Gensis? is it?
So Darksied hires out Lobo to do some recon on supes. Recon meaning he asks him to kill him an bring his body back for study to make clones or something. But in reality Darksied sees if supes beats Lobo then he will earn enough of his interest to be addressed by him personally if not then he has a dead krytonian body that might prove useful.
So opening 15-20min of the movie is supes in warworld helpin people overthrow Mongol an escaping,ect. Then we flash forward to just after the SR movie, ever so often getting flashes of Apokolips, Darksied, minions, preping, using boom tubes to go to earth an stir things up, ect. to test supes abilities.
Then we see luthor an learn he still has some krypton tech an unleashes/merges with brainiac. Or we see deep space near destroyed krypton something stirs an follows supes ships trail an that is brainiac the only other krypton survivor. Follows the trail to warworld, an does a cartoon brainiac, absorbs all the knowledge then destroys it. Which darksied watches from the shadows.
Lobo lands on earth an supes an him fight, supes gets beat down somewhat an escapes. Luthor finds lobo an helps him, givin him kryptonite to help him win. Supes sees the kryptonite a mile away an uses a radition suit an wins. Lobo gets boom tubed by darksied, an darksied watches from shadows as brainiac approaches earth.
Lex, now the coporate business man type, plays the public humanitarian to the tee, but supes knows better. Brainiac attacks fortress of solitude supes stops brainiac almost destroys it. Lex finds brainiac helps it and/or merges with it. Then another fight between supes an brainiac/lex, that of course supes barely wins. Lex seemingly recovers after publicly announcing he was taken over getting public sympathy, but in reality he an supes both know he willingly merged w/ brainiac an tried to kill supes. With darksied still plotting an planning in the backround setting up the next sequel.
The next sequel he supes fights all darksied minions an apokolips armies, an darksied beats them all down, then fights a renewed darksied merged with brainiac an beats him down too.=)

Thats gold, gold jerry! gold!