Superman Returns should've been the Man of Steel's big triumphant return to the big screen, but the finished product was... a mixed bag, shall we say.
It wasn't short on creativity though, and despite the fact that it was pretty much just one big homage to the Christopher Reeve films of the seventies and eighties, some new ideas did worm their way into production. One such idea involved having Superman travel all the way back to Krypton, which in this interpretation of the mythos, was still intact (albeit completely desolate).
The actual sequence itself is suitably atmospheric, as the Last Son of Krypton navigates the planet's surface, before discovering a toxic kryptonite core lying underneath.
Superman Returns was fairly long to begin with anyway, but the scene was a lot more entertaining than most of what survived the cutting room floor.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
