Shortly after the release of Mission: Impossible - Fallout in 2018, we learned that filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie had approached Warner Bros. about helming interconnected Green Lantern and Superman movies.
The latter would have served as Man of Steel 2 following Zack Snyder's DCEU departure, with McQuarrie eager to reunite with Henry Cavill after the actor played the villainous CIA assassin August Walker.
Josh Horowitz asked the director about his take on Superman, to which McQuarrie responded, "I'll never tell. I'll never tell, but boy was it f***ing good. It was f***ing good."
He'd go on to elaborate on his Man of Steel 2 pitch by revealing more about the outline he came up with for a Green Lantern reboot. "Green Lantern was what came to me. Green Lantern is a tough one," McQuarrie explained. "The power is...I cracked it, and it was fun watching him learn how to use that power and giving that power a flaw, so it was not pure invincibility."
"The whole concept of Green Lantern is that the ring has to be recharged. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, you have infinite power, but you only have so much battery life, and that can run out at inconvenient times," he continued. "That, for me, solved the whole Green Lantern problem. The costume is another thing."
"I realised, don't worry about the costume, worry about the character. How do you give that character tension and stakes? Also, how do you do it with Superman?" McQuarrie noted. "Henry had a take on that, and I suddenly realised how these two characters had amazing similarities, which also allowed for amazing conflict and an amazing universe-expanding resolution."
We'll never know what he had planned, but Warner Bros. reportedly wanted McQuarrie to take another crack at Man of Steel 2 when Cavill returned to the DCEU in Black Adam. It's unclear how close that was to happening, especially as James Gunn started working on a Superman script shortly after shooting The Suicide Squad.
Ultimately, he was hired to write and direct Superman, and has since rebooted the DCU as DC Studios co-CEO (meaning Cavill's short-lived return came to nought). That led to McQuarrie's plans falling by the wayside.
McQuarrie, still reluctant to say too much, later dropped an intriguing tease about how his version of Man of Steel 2 opened. "I will tell you, the first 5 minutes of my Superman movie was...you remember Pixar's Up? [It was] a sequence with no dialogue that covered that character."
"[It] was a set-up, after which you knew exactly what makes Superman tick and exactly what Superman was most afraid of and why Superman made the choices he made. It would have been epic. The scale of the movie would have been absolutely extraordinary," he teased.
It's hard to shake the feeling that we missed out on something incredible here with McQuarrie's Superman plans. Still, with the Mission: Impossible franchise now wrapped up, there's always a chance he considers tackling another comic book movie.
You can hear more from McQuarrie in the player below.