10 Movies That Peaked Too Soon

10. Superman Returns

Though Bryan Singer's Superman Returns is far from a bad film, it was nevertheless one that came and went without making much of a dent in the cultural consciousness.

One suspects its dew-eyed homage to the 1978 Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve Superman might've proved more successful in a present-day Hollywood obsessed with exploiting nostalgia, even if it's tough to deny that the film nevertheless peaks obscenely early.

There's really only a single scene that's fondly remember by fans, and that's the superbly crafted sequence where Superman (Brandon Routh) saves a plane containing Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) and other reporters from crashing into a baseball stadium.

It is exactly the sort of high-stakes, elegantly executed set-piece that every Superman movie needs, to establish the Man of Steel's plucky heroism in relatively everyday circumstances, and it's a high the rest of the film never gets close to replicating.

This is particularly problematic as the sequence occurs barely 40 minutes into the movie's beefy 154-minute runtime, the rest of which is largely concerned with Superman's uninteresting fatherhood woes and pedestrian nods to the original Donner movie.