WEIRDO Ranks: Every Live-Action Superman Movie 🦸🏻‍♂️ (Part 3 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.
6. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
If I could give this movie any merit, it’s that it could be seen as the first superhero spoof ever created. Released in 1987, Christopher Reeve’s final Superman film was met with major criticism and disdain out the gate. After the epic flop that was Superman III, Reeve vowed to redeem his legacy with the fourth film, proclaiming it to be “the best one in the franchise.” The outcome: a corny, lackluster product that makes you wonder how it ever got the green light in the first place.
Superman IV’s story sees the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a nuclear arms race that could potentially destroy the entire planet. Superman naturally decides to take action and fling all the nuclear warheads into space, creating a peace the likes of which hadn’t been achieved before, hence the title. Prior to all this, Lex Luthor’s nephew, Lenny, breaks him out of prison, allowing Lex to clone Superman with a strand of his DNA. Enter: Nuclear Man.
Mark Pillow’s imposing figure should have made for an interesting foil to the Man of Steel, but his cheesy dialogue, dubbed-over voice (by Gene Hackman, no less), and unchanging facial expressions resulted in a villain more memorable for his outlandish costume and powers than anything else. Superman ends up fighting Nuclear Man throughout the skies of Metropolis, then finally on the moon in a perplexedly slow-motion bout that concludes with the superhero pushing the moon in front of the sun to weaken the blonde giant. The 80’s were quite strange indeed.
However, despite everything I just said, The Quest for Peace just barely falls into that so-bad-it’s-good territory, meaning I can find some semblance of entertainment from watching it. Sure, the recycled clips of Superman flying followed by his random newfound abilities — as well as the film’s parodical performances and blasphemous back-half — leave me with somewhat of a weird taste in my mouth, but I still find myself unreasonably preferring it over Superman II and Superman III for the simple fact that it’s just dumb fun, which is a film trait that I’ll always be a sucker for.
