A decent amount of fans are interested in seeing the Death of Superman storyline adapted into a movie. This idea doesn't work for several reasons. For starters, The Death of Superman sucks. OK. I'll be a little bit more mature about it. The Death of Superman really isn't that great of a story. Doomsday shows up and starts wreaking havoc. Some Justice League members try to stop him. He kicks the crap out of them. Superman shows up. They fight. They fight some more. They fight a little bit more and then...fight some more. After all this fighting both of them die. I know there's the whole World Without Superman and Return of Superman, but when it comes down to it, the basic plot is that Superman appears to die and comes back. Why is this story so famous if it really isn't that good?
Well, DC made a huge spectacle out of the whole thing. This thing was making the front pages of news papers! Some people really thought Superman was going to be gone so they rushed out to buy what they thought could be the final story of this beloved character. It was all just a big publicity stunt. Imagine this:
"Say it ain't so! Superman can't be dead"
"OK. It ain't so"
"Please DC! You just have to bring him- wait. He's not dead? "
"Nah. We were just screwing with you."
In the end Superman wasn't even really dead. He was in stasis in some kind regeneration matrix in the Fortress of Solitude. So Superman didn't even really die in The Death of Superman. Wasn't that the main selling point? Anyway, one of my big problems is that Doomsday doesn't really seem deserving of the honor of being the villain that kills Superman. He's just this brutish monster that the writers created for the sole purpose of being the thing powerful enough to kill Superman. I realize there's more to the back story, but he's pretty much just a mindless killing machine that's more of a plot device than a character. I also don't feel like the scale of the event was big enough. I guess Doomsday would have continued to cause destruction if he wasn't stopped, but I think it would have been better if Superman died protecting the world from a more serious threat, maybe knowingly sacrificing himself.
This article isn't just supposed to be a critique of that story though. My opinion of the story aside, I feel that it just doesn't make sense to adapt this story into movie format. The Death of Superman alone is obviously too simple to make a whole movie out of. Because of that, they would probably have to do it from the Death through the Return. The second part of the trilogy is a World Without Superman. A major strength of the story of The Death of Superman was that it had an impact on the whole DC universe. Right now, there is no DC movie universe. The only people you can show who have been affected by Superman's death are his supporting cast. Even if you incorporate elements of the Reign of the Supermen storyline, people really aren't interested in watching a bunch of characters that they really don't care about. You can't have a Superman Movie Without Superman for an extended period of time. You watch a Superman movie to see Superman!
Then there's the Return part. Like I said before, the death is probably too simple to do without showing the return. However, having a character die and return within the same movie really lessens the affect. Pretty much everyone would know that Superman would be coming back, but deaths need to be given time to have some impact. You want your audience to believe the character is really dead. I'm not opposed to killing off Superman. However, doing it in the first movie of what is hopefully a new franchise really isn't the way to do it. In this scenario, the audience hasn't had very much time to grow attached to the actor playing Superman. If you kill him off in the last movie of a trilogy, then you can really make the death have an emotional impact. My ideal Superman movie death would be to have a Superman trilogy, then have Superman die in a Justice League movie (Ideally, if there are more than one, kill him off in the second and bring him back in the third).
Now, hypothetically, let's say they were to go with The Death of Superman as their story. If so, the plot would need to be seriously overhauled to add some story. I know this sounds contradictory to what I wrote earlier, but if Superman dies in a movie he should die at the end. Since in The Death of Superman, he dies at the end and there's not that much that happens before the fight with Doomsday, the plot would have to be altered so that there's a lot of story before the Doomsday fight instead of the fight being pretty much the whole thing like it was originally. The fight would occur in about the last 15-20 minutes. I have no idea what the plot of the movie would be before that, because the source material doesn't give much to work with.
Thanks for reading! Check out the video version of this article here. It's always a fun option for those of you who might be feeling too lazy to read and would just like to listen. And, of course, it has a fun intro!