It wasn’t until the 2000s and the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that superhero movies really began their dominance over the entertainment industry at large. However, superheroes and comic-book characters have a long history of big-screen appearances stretching back nearly half a century. There have been numerous staples in the genre that have propelled it to greater heights, such as 1989’s Batman, 1998’s Blade, and 2002’s Spider-Man. However, the father of all modern superhero flicks is 1978’s Superman, directed by Richard Donner.
The film is a pretty straightforward telling of Superman’s origin story. It opens with the destruction of Kal-El’s home planet Krypton, with Marlon Brando monologuing about as his father, Jor-El. It then moves on to a young Clark Kent growing up in Smallville, Kansas, failing to save his father from death and learning who he is and how he fits into the world. Eventually, he dons the red and blue spandex and takes to the skies as the most iconic superhero ever published, Superman. He rescues people from various predicaments, saves cats out of trees, romanticizes with Lois Lane, and tries to stop the evil deeds of the villainous Lex Luthor. It’s a joyous and hopeful movie that’s just about a good person trying to do the right thing.
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There has been a lot said before about the overall quality of Superman. It emerged as a massive hit at the dawn of blockbuster filmmaking, and it established Christopher Reeve as Hollywood royalty. Moving beyond the overall quality of the film, though, Superman also served as a shifting moment in the American film industry. It was further proof that this kind of spectacle-event film could really bring people out to the theater. The film’s influence on blockbusters and superhero films can still be felt today.
The First Major Superhero Movie
Warner Bros. Pictures
Prior to Superman, there really hadn’t been any major blockbuster superhero movies. The only notable theatrical superhero film production was Batman in 1966, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, which followed the success of the campy live-action series of the early ‘60s. It was Superman, in December of 1978, that changed everything. As a blockbuster, it was building on the success of films like Star Wars, Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, it was the first foray into the world of comic-book superheroes on the big screen that had some real weight behind it.
Superman wasn’t developed as a cheap cash-in on a recognizable character. The filmmaking team and Warner Bros, the studio behind the movie, put genuine effort and hard work into the film to make it as best they could. WB put up a lot of money for the film, giving it a budget of $55 million, which was unheard of at the time. For reference, The Empire Strikes Back had a budget of $18 million and Close Encounters was given $20 million. Superman set a new record for the most expensive film ever made, beating out 1963’s Cleopatra by over $20 million. It would continue to hold that record for another decade before it was supplanted by Rambo III.
The production of Superman was the first time that a major studio really got behind a superhero story and was willing to provide the immense sum of money needed to produce the film (and its effects) well. Thankfully for WB, the film was a massive success. It earned over $300 million at the global box office, which is equivalent to over $1 billion today when adjusted for inflation. It was an international box office sensation. People loved Superman and drove it to become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time at that point. Based on that success, there would be three sequels to the film produced over the course of the next decade, turning Superman from the first successful theatrical superhero film to the first big-screen superhero franchise.
Grand Powers and Effects
At the time of Superman’s release, blockbuster filmmaking was still in its infancy. That style of movie had really just come about a few years prior, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws often credited as its advent in 1975. Following that, and after the immense success of Star Wars in 1977, every studio wanted its own big blockbusters full of action and exciting visual effects. Superman was one of WB’s first out of the gate. The story of an alien escaping the destruction of his planet and then coming to Earth to become a superhuman figure with the powers of a god will inherently come with a lot of visual effects work that needs doing.
There were massive teams assembled to work on the special and visual effects of Superman, and Donner didn’t want to cut any corners. The destruction of Krypton, Superman’s flight, Lex Luthor’s decimation of the West Coast, not only did it all happen in the script, but it was shown in-detail, on-screen. There were no cheap cutaways to hide unfinished or lackluster effects. The visual effects and model work of the film is some of the best of its era, and it couldn’t have been anything less. With a tagline like “You’ll believe a man can fly,” the film was really riding on the quality of its effects.
While Superman was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1979, specifically Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score, it was for the film’s visual effects that Superman was given its Oscar. The visual effects team behind Superman (led by Les Bowie, Colin Chilvers, Denys N. Coop, Roy Field, Derek Meddings, and Zoran Perisic) was given a Special Achievement Award for their work on the film during the Oscars that year. It was a well-deserved recognition, as the practical effects for Superman were some of the finest to come from that era of filmmaking. Whether it be the extravagant credits that open the film, the overall look of the planet Krypton, or any of Superman’s various superpowers, everything seen in the film had to be accomplished practically, which took no small amount of movie magic to make happen.
The Impact on the Industry
As cheesy and dated as some of the moments in Superman are, there’s no arguing that the film has been immensely influential on the kinds of blockbuster films that have been made since. As cinema moved into the ‘80s, big blockbusters only continued to grow in their dominance over the industry. The decade started off high with The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, and then the likes of the Superman sequels, the Indiana Jones films, E.T., Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Back to the Future, and more would continue the blockbuster trend. As for the growth of the superhero genre specifically, it was a little slow throughout the ’80s, primarily driven by the Superman films. But the end of the decade would give it the added boost it needed to put it on course for the dominance it has today.
After the release (and massive disappointment) of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in 1987, Warner Bros. knew that they could not continue with the Superman franchise at that time. However, they were keen to continue the superhero trend they had started back in 1978. So, in 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman was released into the world. It was a smash hit and ushered in a new era of superhero movies in the 1990s. There would be three more Batman films throughout the ‘90s, in addition to other new comic-book adaptations such as The Crow, Blade, Men in Black, Spawn, and more.
The road started by Superman then continued into the 2000s, which is when it truly exploded into the unstoppable force it still is today. With the X-Men and Spider-Man movies kicking off the decade, there would be an exponential increase in the major superhero movies produced each year. They ranged from the likes of The Incredibles and The Fantastic Four, to The Dark Knight, Watchmen, Hellboy, Daredevil, The Incredible Hulk and more. There was an attempt to revive the Superman brand during this time as well, with 2006’s Superman Returns starring Brandon Routh. All of this led to the release of Iron Man in 2008, which kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, well, you know the rest.
Although Superman Returns wasn’t the grand re-introduction of the character WB had hoped for, and they are still struggling to figure out what do with the character today, the influence of the original Superman movie can still be felt throughout a majority of the modern superhero flicks. Some films, such as Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, were directly inspired by it, while others have just built upon the genre’s blueprint it established almost 50 years ago. Regardless of how these films implement the lessons they learned from Superman, without its success in ’78, there’s a likelihood that many of the most popular superhero movies of today would not exist at all.
