WEIRDO Ranks: Every Live-Action Superman Movie 🦸🏻‍♂️ (Part 1 of 8)
40+ years of truth and justice!
After many years of superhero cinema, numerous properties have received a plethora of adaptations, more so with Superman. With an abundance of sequels, remakes, and reboots nowadays, it’s difficult to decide which ones deserve a spot among the upper echelons of the comic book world.
Though every movie provides its own significance toward the Kryptonian’s mythos, this series of articles will stamp my official ranking of each Superman film I’ve seen, from 1978's Superman: The Movie to 2021's Zack Snyder’s Justice League. I hope you all enjoy and remember to hit that clap button as well as comment where you would rank each flick on your personal list.
Disclaimer: You might not agree with most of my picks, but that is why I love writing these articles — for amicable debate. Without further ado, let’s get to it! Oh, and spoilers ahead…just in case.
8. Superman III
The fever dream that was Superman III is a strange oddity that nearly killed the franchise upon its release in 1983. Serving as a direct sequel to the far superior Superman II, the film sees its titular hero basically sharing — yes, sharing — a movie with the late Richard Pryor (you read that correctly). Why they decided to go the route of making such an esteemed comedian essentially the main character and concurrently its central villain, I’ll never know.
Leaving behind Gene Hackman’s legendary Lex Luthor, Pryor’s Gus Gorman, a computer programmer, finds himself working for an executive corporation plotting to rule the world financially through the coffee and oil businesses (that’s not all). This new venture in his life eventually leads him to create synthetic Kryptonite to oppose Superman, which (somehow comic-accurately) splits the Kryptonian into two different people: Clark Kent and Evil Superman (I’m not making this up).
Anyway, after Clark kills his evil identity in a hysterical battle for the ages, he reverts back to his normal self to combat a newly transformed cyborg lady (again, not making this up) and satellite-guided missiles. He then destroys a supercomputer with a canister of acid (huh?) along with the help of a reformed Gorman. The final shot shows Superman making a trip to Italy to un-straighten the monumental Pisa tower after it somehow erected earlier in the film (honestly, I already forgot how). Oy vey!
With so much to unpack and so many unforgettably cringy and boring moments in this two-hour crap-fest, I suggest you refrain from watching this flick — unless you decide to do a Superman movie binge or need something to get drunk to and roast for a couple of hours. As a fan of so-bad-it’s-good films, I concede that this picture does not do the sentiment justice as it barely resembles a Superman flick and lacks anything even remotely interesting, fun, or coherent in any way.
