10 Planned Comic Book Movie Sequels (And What Happened)
7. Superman V
The Planned Sequel
The 1978 Superman film is, simply, great. If you can look past the campy Lex Luthor and that whole spinning-the-world-backwards-to-reverse-time, it’s a really great movie, and helped kickstart the superhero movie’s popularity in Hollywood.
The sequels continued the story for four films, and Superman V was on the cards for a while. There’s conflicting reports on what the film was meant to include, but Brainiac was definitely meant to be a part. One draft says he would shrink Metropolis down and fight a micro-sized Superman, while another had Superman die and be resurrected in the shrunken, preserved Krypton city of Kandor.
(Fun fact: the death and rebirth of Superman was unheard of in the comics before this; the infamous Death of Superman arc happened years after Superman V was cancelled due to the poor reviews of its previous two films.)
What Happened?
It was the Superman sequels that ended up causing the film's cancellation. They had gotten progressively worse and worse - the Rotten Tomatoes score for the original was 94%, and the fourth film at an abysmal 12%. Ouch.
The box office records were failing, too - after a huge $300 million on the original's $55 million budget, Superman IV couldn't even make back its cost at $15.6 million gross on a $17 million budget. It took almost another 20 years before production companies had the bravery to try giving the man of steel another go with Superman Returns.