It's no surprise here that Zack Snyder is making it perfectly clear that his new Superman movie will not acknowledge the films of past, including 2006's Superman Returns, which pretty much ignored Superman III & IV, but was a sequel to part II. Snyder's film will be in the same vein as Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (which, it should), and give the iconic hero a new origin, and thus, a new story. Sounds great, but again, it's nothing we didn't already expect to happen.
When Bryan Singer took moviegoers to Metropolis in the 2006 film ”Superman Returns,” he paid careful homage to the hero’s cinematic past. Don’t expect that approach from Zack Snyder, who on Wednesday shared his guiding principle: ”Respect the canon but don’t be a slave to the movies.”
Snyder’s version of the Man of Steel is scheduled to reach theaters in December 2012 with Henry Cavill in the title role, and the director said that this will be the first modern Superman feature that will truly break from Richard Donner’s landmark 1978 film, which shared its star, Christopher Reeve, with three sequels and then also deeply informed Singer’s 2006 film, which put Brandon Routh in the iconic blue tights but tapped into both style and story elements from the work of Donner and Reeve.
“Literally, the one thing that everyone can start to think about is that we’re making a movie that finally goes with the approach that there’s been no other Superman movies,” Snyder said. “If you look at ‘Batman Begins,’ there’s that structure, there’s the canon that we know about and respect, but on other hand there’s this approach that pre-supposes that there haven’t been any other movies. In every aspect of design and of story, the whole thing is very much from that perspective of respect the canon but don’t be a slave to the movies.”
Thanks to the LA Times for the story.