Superman II.5

At the behest of Warner Bros., original Superman II director Richard Donner has been putting together a Director’s Cut of the movie, expected to be out later this year. Here are a few of the restored clips.

For those not familiar with the story of the film’s creation: Donner, along with story writer Mario Puzo, was responsible for creating the 1978 Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. He envisioned the story as a two-parter, and did most of the principal shooting for Superman II at the same time.

Before he could wrap up the project, he was ousted thanks to the producers, Ilya and Alexander Salkind. The new director, Richard Lester, had the job of piecing together a movie from existing footage and filming (or, in some cases, re-filming) the rest of the scenes.

Gene Hackman refused to come back after Donner was unceremoniously canned, so for every scene that Lester shot which required Luthor, they had to use a stand-in who you would only see from the back. Any unrecorded dialogue required a soundalike looped into the film.

We’ll finally get to see Superman II (mostly) as Donner intended it — he still has to use some of Lester’s scenes with Bizarro-Luthor (et al) because no other footage exists, but he’ll certainly be able to get the film most of the way there. I look forward to it.

~Sean