12 Movies That Were Dead On Arrival

A cautionary tale for today’s purveyors of endless celluloid superheroics: you’ve got to know when enough is enough. After the success of the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films, the studio must have felt untouchable, but the less than enthusiastic response to the third picture should have set off alarm bells.

Instead, after four Superman-free years, they came out with Superman IV, one of the genre’s greatest disasters. It boasts many tropes of a franchise in free fall: a lame story involving a doppelganger; some timely social commentary; a Scrappy Doo-esque young relative to bring in the kids. The flimsy and often baffling plot sees Superman battle a radioactive clone of himself, with perennial foe Lex Luthor, teaming with his irritating nephew Lenny, spending much of the runtime watching from the sidelines.

Naturally, the man from Krypton saves the day, delivering a timely speech about East-West relations (two years after Rocky took care of all that) and chucking nephew Lenny in an orphanage in one of the franchise’s more questionable happy endings. More than two decades on, this remains the benchmark for superhero guff.