It turns out Kevin Smith Actually Wrote a Pretty Entertaining Superman Movie

Over the weekend, Kevin Smith hosted a reading of his Superman Lives script at Smodcastle Cinemas, the movie theater he owns in Atlantic Highlands, NJ. Smith was joined onstage by Austin Zajur, the Clerks III actor who will serve as the star of Smith's upcoming film The 4:30 Movie, as well as Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith; Comic Book Men stars Mike Zapcic and Ming Chen; and Men in Black star Siobhan Fallon Hogan, each of whom read at least one character in a 1997 screenplay Smith had written, with an eye toward the movie being made by filmmaker Tim Burton.

Following the script reading, Smith said -- joked? -- that he was glad Warner Bros. never made the movie, although he did enjoy seeing a piece of the script reflected back at him in The Flash, when Nicolas Cage's Superman fought a giant spider, which vomited tiny robot versions of itself onto the Man of Steel. The audience, made up primarily of hardcore Smith fans, obviously disagreed.

Here's the thing: the script was actually a really entertaining superhero movie. It wouldn't have knocked Christopher Reeve's Superman: The Movie off the Mount Rushmore of superhero movies, but it likely would have been received more warmly than the next Superman movie that eventually did get made, 2005's Superman Returns. 

In Superman Lives, Lex Luthor teams with Brainiac to remove Superman as an obstacle to both of their goals, although Luthor doesn't realize he is being manipulated by the smarter alien. Brainiac send Doomsday after the Man of Steel, and as in the comics, Superman and Doomsday kill one another, leaving the world stunned. The Eradicator, a sophisticated piece of Kryptonian technology that Brainiac secretly covets, is forced to come out of hiding to revive Superman, and ultimately it's up to Superman and The Eradicator to repel Brainiac before he leaves the Earth a lifeless husk.

The movie featured some cameos from other DC characters, including a Batman who would have been played by Michael Keaton, but the script handles the shared universe, as well as the death and return of Superman, as small parts of a larger story. While there was some criticism of Zack Snyder's eventual decision to use "The Death of Superman" story in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the Superman Lives script revealed so quickly that Eradicator was going to save the hero that it didn't feel as much like the story was coming "too early." The fact that the death and return was the whole point and didn't feel like an afterthought likely would have avoided most of the criticisms Snyder got out of his movie.

The screenplay is certainly very '90s, and it could stand a dialogue polish since it was an early draft, but seeing it performed really did emphasize how much promise the story had. It had a coherent plot that used a lot of '80s and '90s Superman characters in a cool, creative way. The characters were earnest and believable, and the relationships had humor and heart. And, as Smith himself noted halfway through the script reading, there's a point where Superman is using The Eradicator as a suit of armor to approximate his own powers...and the script inadvertently predicts the relationship that Iron Man would have with JARVIS a decade later.

The screenplay for Superman Lives is out there on the internet. It may not read quite as well on paper as it does when professionals are doing their thing, but it's likely worth a look. Certainly, if the movie had been made, and had been made in a form that retained most of what Smith wrote, it's likely it would have been a success in the pre-MCU age of heroes.