10 Reasons Why Richard Donner's Superman Is Still Awesome

By casting Reeve in the lead, Donner decided the best way to compensate for his lack of star power was to pack the supporting cast with some of the biggest names in American cinema at the time. As a result, Christopher Reeve ended up being billed only third in the credits, but when you've got Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman in your movie you've got to get your priorities straight.

Brando was notoriously difficult to work with on this movie. Not only did he mispronounce the name of his own planet constantly, he read all of his lines off of cue cards and at one point even asked if he could be replaced by a floating bagel; no, that really happened. But his performance as Jor-El is fantastic and sells the epic gravitas of the movie in its opening minutes; his speech to young Kal-El as he sends him off in the rocket still brings a tear to the eye.

There are too many names to count and we'll be covering a bunch of them later, but just to name a few: Ned Beatty as Luthor's bumbling assistant Otis will always be a memorable goofball, Jackie Cooper as Daily Planet chief Perry White is like the progenitor to JK Simmons' J. Jonah Jameson, and Glenn Ford as Jonathan Kent gives Clark his entire moral centre in just a few minutes of screentime.