Superman V... What Could Have Been

For most fans of the Superman franchise we like to act like the third and fourth sequels never happened. For us everything ended after Superman II. But what if they had actually made Superman V. The plan was to restore the icon to his proper status and rejuvenate the franchise. They intended to skip over the third and fourth installments, and basically pick up where we left off from the end of the second film. Somewhat like a reboot, but only going back mid-way through the series.

Comic book writer Cary Bates wrote a treatment and then a draft for what would have been Superman V: Superman Reborn with Christopher reeve set to reprise the role. Bates recently spoke to Newsarama, and shared what his vision for the man of steel could have been:

"The intent was to leapfrog over Superman III and especially IV, and return the series to the high mark achieved in 1 and 2,"

"[It was] our desire to do a fully developed, balls-out science fiction story pitting Superman and Brainiac against each other mano a mano. The premise involved a new take on the whole Brainiac-Kandor portion of the Superman mythos."

There plans was to basically do a retelling of the first classic Brainiac story from the comics, and give Superman an opponent to pose a real threat.

"[Brainiac] comes to Earth for the first time and shrinks Metropolis, adding it to his interplanetary collection of miniaturized cities, But because he becomes aware of the unique super-powered being in his latest acquisition, Brainiac miniaturizes himself and ventures into the bottled Metropolis in person. This leads to a knock-down drag-out battle that ends in what appears to be Superman’s death."

The idea for Superman's death on film came long before the hugely popular death of Superman in comics, which also dealt with a similar rebirth scenario for the character, but with a slightly different take on what happened after the fact.

"A split-second before his atoms would’ve been permanently disintegrated, they are sucked into a bottle-city a few rows over... Kandor, there he is 'reborn' as a mortal man, where he gets to reconnect with his Kryptonian roots as he begins the arduous process of rehabilitating himself and eventually escaping from Kandor to resume his battle with Brainiac."

The Brainiac intended to appear in Superman V was a combination of the green skinned alien and the robot version that had both appeared in the comics over the span of over 30 years, from the 50's right up until the 80's.

"While this two-tier approach to Brainiac proved to be an extremely important component to the plot, the original reason was much more pragmatic, Our Brainiac had to be human much of time, or the producers would’ve faced the dilemma of throwing away big bucks to hire a big-name actor who would be reduced to an unseen voice-over artist for a mechanical or CGI robot."

Thankfully it's probably a good thing this wasn't made. The draft released online wasn't anywhere near as awesome as it sounds in bates descriptions of the story, and the visual effects in the early 90's that would be needed to achieve a lot of what they wanted to do would look cheesy and fake. Even still I have to wonder would have come of the franchise had we seen an on screen interpretation of Brainiac, and a film that rejuvenated the franchise. Would we have still received the sequel/reboot Superman returns from Singer, who knows.

The fact they had plans to develop Brainiac for the big screen once before makes me optimistic to think that Goyer and Nolan may have gone down a similar path. That's something I know myself and a number of other fans could easily get behind. After all do we really to see Superman get his ass kicked by Kevin Spacey again, and then fly of with an island? No, we need to see a battle of epic proportions!