Mark Waid's Take on Superman Returns

Mark Waid, who is currently writing Legion of Super-Heroes, and has written Kingdom Come and Superman: Birthright, weighed in on Superman Returns, the Bryan Singer film and the upsurge in superhero films in general.

"[W]ith the advent of special effects, it's just become easier to shoot stuff," he told the Monitor Duty fan site. "We could do stuff in comics you could never do in movies with budgets. The moment P2 technology came out, everyone I know in comics got an uneasy feeling. This is the future and there's going to be a point where there's nothing they can't do. Neil Gaiman just told me the other day how he was talking to Bob Gale about the Beowulf movie he's working on. It was originally envisioned as live-action but now it's going to be motion-capture or some sort of weird hybrid. And the quote from Gale was 'There's nothing I can't shoot for a million dollars a minute.' If you figure, a 90 minute movie, 90 million dollars, not a huge a budget for an action film."

Waid also said that a new generation of Hollywood types are coming into power that grew up reading Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns in 1986. That's fueling some of the interest in caped crusaders. So why don't all superhero films do well?

"It seems to me like it's just real simple. You better have guys in there who love the material. If you look at the X-Men movies, they were faithful in parts, they weren't as faithful in parts, but there's no question when you look at those movies that Bryan Singer and his crew love the comics and that love translates, That seems to be the elusive x-factor. I mean, David Goyer [screenwriter for Blade and Batman Begins] is a huge comics fan," Waid said.

"Whereas, and this is my favorite example to your question, take Catwoman, which is the worst movie I've ever paid to see in my life. The first few early drafts of that script were written by a good friend of mine named John Rogers [screenwriter for American Outlaws and The Core], who is an accomplished screen-writer and very good, and I'm here to tell you those drafts are great. These were great scripts. And John stayed on the project way past the point where he should have because he knew the movie was being made by morons (my words, not his). And his position suddenly became, 'I'm the only guy here who cares about Catwoman, I'm the only guy here who loves comics and I'm not giving up that fight.' So he stayed and fought the good fight as long as he could and then realized he was surrounded by chimpanzees, guys who didn't give a rat's a** about the comics, and he finally threw up his hands and walked away. And his scripts went through like 85 revisions by monkeys and became crap. So as John could tell you from being on ground zero of one of those projects, if you're surrounded by people who 'don't get it' then there's just no hope."

Waid says his favorite superhero movie remains the original Christopher Reeves Superman.

As for Bryan Singer's new Man of Steel movie: "I think it's going to be amazing. From what I've seen of the raw footage, they just get it. I mean, I really had goosebumps."

Read the rest of the interview here.