Superman Movies

“I’m here to fight for truth, and justice, and the American way.”

Superman (1978) is the greatest movie of the eighties.

I know what I said.

Yes, fine, there’s the number “1978” after the title but who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Superman for me is the starting pistol of that era of huge populist genre blockbusters (Indiana Jones, ET, Back to the Future, Never Ending Story et al) that roared into American cinemas as the stings of Vietnam and Watergate began to fade and America discovered a new Reaganite swagger, for good and ill. It is the harbinger of the cultural era that would climax with the collapse of the Berlin wall and the apex of American power and prestige, a victory so total that serious people were able to proclaim the end of history itself and not be laughed out of the room.

And it’s the ultimate eighties movie with regards to the logic that went into creating it. I can almost picture Alexander and Ilya Salkind (the father-son producing team behind the film) chomping on cigars as they hash out their vision.

“We’re gonna make a movie about the BIGGEST SUPERHERO OF THEM ALL!”

“Yeah, and we’ll spend MORE MONEY THAN ANY PICTURE IN HISTORY!”

“Know who we’ll get to write the script? MARIO PUZO, WHO WROTE THE GODFATHER WHICH IS THE BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME WHICH MEANS HE’LL WRITE THE BEST SUPERHERO MOVIE OF ALL TIME!”

*pause for vigorous puffing of cigars*

“Yeah, and we’ll get the BIGGEST MOVIE STAR IN THE WORLD AND PAY HIM MORE THAN ANY ACTOR IN HISTORY FOR TEN MINUTES OF SCREENTIME!”

“And we’ll film the sequel SIMULTANEOUSLY! BACK TO BACK!”

“But Pop, what if the first movie’s a flop?”

“HOW COULD IT BE A FLOP?! LOOK AT HOW MUCH MONEY WE’RE SPENDING!”

“I LOVE YOU POP!”

“I LOVE YOU SON!”

“AND WE BOTH LOVE CIGARS!”

And when you think about it like that, it feels like it had to fail right? It’s like with the Titanic. Once people start talking about how God couldn’t sink this ship, you damn well know that iceberg’s coming. That kind of hubris can’t go unpunished.

And yet.

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“I’m going to give you one last chance to stop acting like Nazi stormtroopers.”

Between the Superman radio series’ colossal decade-long run, the Fleischer cartoons and two multi-part film serials, I have to wonder if audiences in 1951 were starting to experience superhero fatigue. Remember how people complained when we got the Ed Norton Incredible Hulk so soon after Eric Bana’s? That at least was a five year gap. Kirk Alyn had barely flown offscreen before George Reeves stepped into his bright red boots.

Now, you might be a little confused as to why I’m covering this. If I’m only doing the theatrical live action Superman movies, what is George Reeves doing here? Didn’t he play Superman on TV? Indeed he did. Reeves, as well as being the reason why everyone gets Christopher Reeve’s name wrong, was the star of The Adventures of Superman which ran for a mighty impressive 106 episodes in the fifties. However, this movie served as a pilot of sorts for the TV show and was released in theatres. Alyn was apparently offered the chance to return to the role but he declined for two reasons. One, like many movie actors at the time he thought that TV was a passing fad (incorrect) and two, he worried that being typecast as Superman would kill his acting career stone dead (sadly, right on the money).

And so, the mantle passed to George Reeves, a military veteran and B-movie player whose acting career prior to becoming Clark Kent had deteriorated to the point that he’d been forced to take work digging cesspools just to make ends meet. Reeves was a fascinating and admirable man who deserved so much better than his tragic and mysterious death. But, if nothing else, he was for decades THE definitive onscreen Superman.

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“If you still refuse to deal with me after that? I’ll reduce your city to dust.”

Considering the character kickstarted the comic-book superhero genre (asterisk, asterisk) Superman has always been the comic book character least beholden to that medium. In 2025, while it is accurate to call Superman a “comic book character”, it’s also incredibly reductive. Superman is more like Santa Claus. He doesn’t belong to one medium, he simply is. And, unlike almost every other comic book character, I would argue that virtually all of his most important and iconic stories took place outside of the medium of comics. Very early on, Superman expanded beyond the panels of the comic book page and appeared in radio dramas, newspaper strips, novels, cartoons, movie serials and TV shows, to the point that a vast majority of Superman fans aren’t even regular comic book readers.

Consider this: The years between the end of the second world war and the start of the sixties was marked by the near collapse of the superhero genre in comics. And yet Superman not only survived the implosion of the genre he’d birthed, in the fifties he was bigger than he’d ever been, as The Adventures of Superman became one of the first major hits of the television era. But we’re not there yet.

Before he get to George Reeves, we must see out the Kirk Alyn era in style. I won’t lie, I was a little apprehensive approaching 1950’s Atom Man versus Superman. Superman 1948 was a very pleasant surprise but crappy sequels aren’t a recent Hollywood invention and the very few reviews I was able to find (this is, almost certainly, the most obscure Superman movie to ever be put on the big screen) agreed that it was inferior to the first one. There was also the fact that serials from the fifties, the last dying gasp of the medium, are notoriously cheap and ropy.

So colour me shocked that I actually prefer Atom Man versus Superman to its predecessor.

Like, by a lot.

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“Up! Up! And AWAY!”

Yeah, I’m sure you’re all shocked. After watching James Gunn’s Superman I decided it was high time that the big blue boy scout got the same treatment as a certain pointy eared co-worker of his.

So yes, we’re going to be looking at every live action Superman movie while we wait for Matt Reeves to finish the script for The Batman 2 roughly around the time of the heat death of the universe (I am not bitter, I am passionate.)

Let’s begin at the beginning. It’s 1948, a mere decade after Superman’s debut in Action Comics and the character is already a bona fide cultural icon with a radio series, newspaper strips, some of the greatest cartoon shorts ever made and a metric shit ton of merchandise. But, weirdly, despite kicking off the entire superhero genre (asterisk asterisk) Superman was actually pretty late to the party when it came to being adapted into live action.

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