This week, Superman will land in cinemas once again, this time played by actor David Corenswet as part of James Gunn’s reshuffle of the DC Universe. It’s been just three years since we last saw Henry Cavill don the cape – for a mid-credits appearance in Dwayne Johnson’s dismalBlack Adam – while we’ve had alternate versions of the character in TV’s Arrowverse as well as fanboy-pleasing cameos in The Flash film. But there was a time, back before blockbuster cinema was fully at the mercy of superheroes, when Superman floated in limbo. After Christopher Reeve’s final outing as the last son of Krypton in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), it took a now-unthinkable 19 years for Superman to return to the big screen in 2006’s aptly named Superman Returns, a Bryan Singer-directed nostalgia-fest.
That film, starring an unknown actor named Brandon Routh as Superman/Clark Kent, is comfortably the finest in the franchise outside of Reeve’s original Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980). It also boasts one of the greatest action set pieces in any of the films: Superman saving a shuttle-launching-airliner as he plummets into a baseball field.
