Monthly Archives: February 2023

Superman III 4.21: The World According to Attila the Hun

Okay, somebody secure the bankbook, we’ve got incoming. Brando’s famous paycheck for the first movie was $3.7 million at best, and now the Salkinds are paying $4 million for the services of superstar comedian Richard Pryor. So far in the movie, he’s just been typing in the background, but here — in his first sequence with Ross Webster — is the moment where Pryor is out of the chair and bustin’ loose.

Except they forgot to write him any jokes.

Continue reading Superman III 4.21: The World According to Attila the Hun

Superman III 4.20: The Coming of Gunn

And meanwhile, forty years later, Warner Bros. decides to throw away a perfectly good Superman who’s drop-dead gorgeous and full of crowd-pleasing potential, because they want to scrap everything they’ve been doing and embark on a new ten-year plan made up of twenty-seven serialized blockbusters. This is an utterly lunatic thing to do, and yet our entire system of pop culture entertainment has ground to a halt so that we can predict, discuss, analyze and make fun of this plan.

Now, I know that I haven’t been posting very much lately — the blog has slowed down to about Superheroes Three or Four Times a Month, which means we’re not getting anywhere. We’ve just been hovering around the Superman III bowling sequence for ages, which is a terrible place to abandon the people that I love.

It’s just that I’ve been on a roller coaster ride for the last few months about whether I’m ever going to see Henry Cavill play Superman again, and it’s been hard to focus. I mean, technically, I don’t actually like either of Cavill’s Superman films, so honestly what a third Cavill outing means to me in a material sense is a nice movie poster and another couple cover stories in mens’ fitness magazines. But still, it would have been nice, and this has been a trying period for me.

Continue reading Superman III 4.20: The Coming of Gunn