DC Entertainment's loss of Superman's origin is painting a pretty cloudy picture of any new Superman movie. It raises the interesting question of how to bring Superman to the big screen, make it a reboot, but leave out the most well known origin story in comics.
How you might ask is doing that possible? A new story line has surfaced called "Superman: Earth One", a out of continuity graphic novel written by J. Michael Straczynski that could provide the ground work for a Krypton less Superman.
This from Aint it Cool news:
"Clark comes to Metropolis in his 21st year to decide what he really wants to do. And this is someone who can be anyone, do anything. If he keeps his background secret, as he's done for the preceding 21 years, he can be the best athlete the world has ever known, he could be the next Stephen Hawking, could take away the golf crown from Tiger Woods, create patents that could earn billions. He can finally step out of the shadows and into the light.
By contrast, if he chooses to become Superman, then Clark must live forever in the shadows, dedicated to a life of service and self-sacrifice that could eventually get him killed. That's a hard choice for anybody to make, let alone a 21 year old kid who wants to look after his mom and is lured by the idea of money and success and fame. So the story is about Clark's Gethsemane moment, when he has to finally make that choice, why he makes it, and what follows after.
Against this backdrop, we flash back to his life growing up in Smallville, so we can see how the Kents helped mold him and protect him and get him to a point in his life where he can finally make this most difficult of choices."
This sounds like a good approach for a new Superman movie but this idea screams 'Smallville' to me, and I have had enough of 'Smallville'.
Forget any mention of who might actually be Superman in the next installment of the franchise. DC has to now worry about changing almost everything we know about the Man of Steel's origin to fit the requirements of the most recent court ruling that puts all of Krypton out of DC's reach. Hopefully they just go ahead and drop the origin story. In realty that's all we have really had of Superman since the 70's. It's been done to death. Please make a Superman movie were Superman fights someone his own size. Superman 2 was cool but they can even step that up with today's technology. Now all we need is someone to grow the nards to make Superman PG-13 so that we can see some real action.