For those of you that haven’t heard the news, a judge has ruled that Time Warner are no longer the sole pro­pri­etors of the Super­man fran­chise — with the heirs of co-creator Jerome Siegel hav­ing an enti­tle­ment to the share of the US copy­right. The copy­right cov­ers only a por­tion of the Super­man cre­ation — that being the fun­da­men­tal ele­ments — the cos­tume, Clark Kent, Lois Lane.

In short, this means that Time Warner may now be liable, pend­ing a court appeal, to pay out for Super­man Returns. This rul­ing may also lead the Shuster’s to fol­low suit (the other half of the Super­man cre­ation team) and claim another large por­tion of the copy­right. Ulti­mately it all puts the future of The Man of Steel into jeop­ardy, not to men­tion the already trou­bled Jus­tice League film.

NYTimes

Vari­ety are run­ning an inter­est­ing report con­cern­ing the next Super­man film, dubbed Man of Steel,

“Super­man Returns” scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Har­ris have opted not to come back and pen a sequel to the 2006 sum­mer pic that would have reunited them with helmer Bryan Singer. The three also worked together on “X2: X-Men United.”

The arti­cle con­tin­ues, stat­ing that WB are now accept­ing pitches for new writ­ers. There is also some spec­u­la­tion about the nature of the next movie, some say­ing that it will be rev­o­lu­tionised in the same way that the new Hulk fea­ture is being improved, whilst the WB are adamant that it will remain a true sequel to Super­man Returns.

Recently a lot of “will they wont they” dis­cus­sion has been aired about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a Jus­tice League movie; ide­ally recruit­ing Chris­t­ian Bale as Bat­man and Bran­don Routh as Super­man — amongst oth­ers. These rumors were orig­i­nally fuelled by two Vari­ety arti­cles, the first reveal­ing that Warner Bros. were look­ing into the movie’s development,

“The Jus­tice League of Amer­ica has been a peren­nial favorite for gen­er­a­tions of fans, and we believe their appeal to film audi­ences will be as strong and diverse as the char­ac­ters themselves.”

And the sec­ond enti­tled “Jus­tice League film gets script”.

Husband-wife writ­ing duo Kieran Mul­roney and Michele Mul­roney turned in a first draft that had Warner Bros. suits actu­ally smiling

How would this film­ing sched­ule work in-between TDK and Man of Steel? Would the cor­rect cast be present? These are the ques­tions being asked. The IESB had a chance to talk to Chris­t­ian Bale, he stated cat­e­gor­i­cally that he was not involved in the adap­ta­tion and nor had he been approached. And later Moviehole con­firmed that the WB are look­ing for an all new cast and that the movie was “full steam ahead” with cast­ing start­ing imme­di­ately. They also men­tioned an assigned direc­tor, George Miller (Happy Feet meets Mad Max).

All this seemed a lit­tle con­fus­ing until the final and fit­ting piece of the puz­zle unearthed, how this could be pos­si­ble with­out dis­may­ing fans and whilst aim­ing for an early 2008 pro­duc­tion sched­ule. The IESB have a num­ber of some­what reli­able sources stat­ing that the JLA movie shall in fact be a CGI/Motion Cap­ture film (e.g. sim­i­lar to The Polar Express or more recently Beowulf). This still needs some clo­sure but it all makes per­fect sense. These films tra­di­tion­ally take slightly longer to cre­ate so we could see a late 2009, sum­mer 2010 release.

In July this year Vari­ety reported that Kevin Spacey would return as Lex Luthor in the lat­est Super­man movie. This con­fir­ma­tion was made as Singer pitched The Man of Steel, as scripted by Returns writer Michael Dougherty, to Warner,

Spacey hopes to shoot his Luthor role in a six-week block, as he did on “Super­man Returns,” after he com­pletes his run in David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow” in April.

“At the end of this film we see that there is so much more to explore.” said Bran­don Routh at the end of Super­man Returns; inevitably open­ing up the fran­chise for a sec­ond mod­ern sequel.  In August 2006 , in an inter­view with the LA Times,  Alan Horn, Warner pres­i­dent, announced that they were hop­ing to com­plete a sequel to Super­man Returns for a 2009 release. Bryan Singer, direc­tor of Super­man Returns and other cult films such as X-men and Usual Sus­pects, echoed these sen­ti­ments at the 2006 San Diego Comic Con.

And in an inter­view with Super­Hero­Hype he said,

I’d like to build on the seeds that are planted, you know, expand upon rela­tion­ships, you’ve now got a child, you’ve got these other ele­ments, but also have the oppor­tu­nity to have the char­ac­ters more estab­lished to bring in some more action and have some more stuff going on. 

As of Octo­ber 2006 a deal between Singer and Warner was agreed.

Wel­come to this fledg­ling blog that shall dis­cuss, inform and divulge all the lat­est Super­man movie details as they are unveiled, exposed or released. This site was launched on August 14th 2007.