Disturbing Truth Behind The Superman Movie Curse

4. The Early Days

With their studio already suffering and their personal relationship in tatters, the brothers were tasked with making Superman for Paramount, but sought to price themselves out of the project. Remarkably the studio accepted their insistence on an inflated budget and they were locked into a series of shorts they had no interest in really making.

They'd make only 9 of the groundbreaking serials, inventing the idea of Superman flying in the process (in the comics, he could merely leap far) before their studio fell apart entirely with huge financial penalties for over-spending on their feature debut, Gulliver's Travels. Their issues weren't caused by Superman, but even their success with the character couldn't fix anything and they were unable to even work together by 1941.

More relevant to the theorists on Superman's nefarious influence on actors is Kirk Alyn, the first live action Superman, whose career was apparently destroyed by typecasting, because nobody could see any character on him other than Krypton's last son. After his second serial, in 1950's Atom Man vs Superman, he worked on 12 more movies, receiving a credit for just one (and another was a cameo in the 1978 Superman as Lois Lane's father). He lived to the age of 88, but he had no real career to speak of after donning the cape.

And then came George Reeves...

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