The hair dye industry needs to up its advertising budget

[seriousfic]

So I've seen some talk that Amy Adams should be playing Lana Lang, surely stemming from the fact that she has red hair. Which weirds me out, because I think Lana Lang is the last time a Superman movie needs? Maybe it's just that Smallville already did, what, eight years of Clark/Lana when you knew they weren't going to end up together, so I don't see what's so fascinating about that relationship that it demands a movie. There's plenty to do with the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, and even Lois/Lex, before you get into cliched Betty & Veronica situations. There's Clark falling in love with Lois but Lois being in love with Superman, Lois falling in love with Clark 'for real,' the revelation of his secret identity, marriage... You could fill the obligatory trilogy with that, easy.

But Lana in an origin movie? It would smirk of prequelitis, when a movie focuses on bullshit that you know is extraneous to the larger story. As long as you're spending two hundred million dollars on a movie, why not cut to the chase?

Comments

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Here's an idea:

At what point do decades-old characters like Superman and Batman finally become well-known to the general public enough that we can simply dispense with the origin stories altogether and begin media in res?

I mean, seriously, for as much shit as I saw talked about the RDJ Sherlock in certain corners of fandom (I liked it, but I can understand why others wouldn't), the one mistake that nobody can accuse Guy Ritchie of making was to show us Sherlock and Mycroft's childhood rivalry and how that formed the basis of Sherlock's need to one-up the intellect of everyone around him and OH LOOK HE WENT TO SCHOOL WITH MORIARTY HARBLHARBLHARBL

I mean, what the fuck? It's not even like the comics, where they're afraid of anything that diverges from the status quo because they know the next asshole is going to mangle the fuck out of continuity to drag it back to what HE grew up with, because at MOST, any given franchise is going to last a DECADE before it's rebooted from scratch, so why WASTE the first of that finite series of films on retelling the origin YET AGAIN?

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

At what point do decades-old characters like Superman and Batman finally become well-known to the general public enough that we can simply dispense with the origin stories altogether and begin media in res?

To be fair, that's what Superman Returns did. And at the time of its production, I remember everyone at Superhero Hype clamoring for a reboot.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

No, what Superman Returns did was require its viewers to already be familiar with a very specific previously-told version of Superman's backstory — except, you know, with certain random parts of its continuity cherry-picked out — which would be the equivalent of writing a Sherlock Holmes movie which only makes sense as a direct sequel to "The Final Problem," except that in the director's head-canon, Holmes and Moriarty still hadn't had their confrontation (just as Singer said that Superman Returns was a direct sequel to the Richard Donner Superman films, except that Singer ALSO stated that, in his head-canon, Superman hadn't fought Zod yet).

A reboot does not require a retelling of the origin. The RDJ/Ritchie Holmes was a reboot of that character, compared to every previous version, and yet, no origin story! Just like countless other characters in popular fiction, with whom we only found out parts of their pasts as they became pertinent to the present-day events, and never before.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say that. Just going by the movie, all you need to know is that Lex Luthor is bad news and hates Superman, that Lois loves Superman and was in a sexual relationship with him, and all the Krypton junk. The hows and whys were in the Donner movies, but I don't think anyone who hadn't seen those films would be lost (in fact, it could be helpful, since otherwise the conception of Jason becomes really murky).

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

The problem being that, WITHOUT the Donner backstory, Lois comes across as incredibly dumb for never questioning whether Cyclops is actually the father of her kid, given the timing of the sexual relationship that must have occurred with Superman and his departure, and WITH the Donner backstory, the audience is left wondering why Lois isn't screaming RAPE over the fact that Superman apparently slipped her some Super-Roofies to make her forget him impregnating her. Moreover, WITHOUT the Donner backstory, all that we know is that Superman and Lois had sex, but Lois STILL doesn't know that he's really Clark Kent who pines away for her from afar, which makes her look like a total idiot for STILL not figuring it out, and him look like even MORE of a stalker creep for not telling her. There is literally no way to make that movie internally consistent without all of the characters (except for Cyclops) coming across as unforgiably horrible people, right down to Superman whispering to his son that he WON'T be telling him why he's going to grow up a freakish outcast, and he WON'T step in to help him, but he WILL be watching his progress from up in the sky, which is the point at which Singer's conception of Superman becomes actively EVIL.

[miss-tress.livejournal.com]

The bit about the actress having red hair means she has to play Lana and not Lois just boggled my mind. I keep thinking it has to be an elaborate troll.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm with you in not wanting to see Clark/Lana again after 7 1/2 years of that relationship on Smallville. I'm going to go one step further and state what I'm guessing is an unpopular opinion: I don't want to see Clark/Lois either. For me, it's the same issue as with Clark/Lana -- the love story has been (over)done in the recent past (it's currently front and center on Smallville) and I don't feel there's a need to rehash it so soon. So I'm hoping they lay off the romance angle and focus more on the action plot.

Lois/Lex, though, makes me go "Hmmm"...

Also, IMO at some point surely the Clark/Lois love story becomes well known enough that we can skip the obligatory Triangle for Two and begin the story with them as an established couple.

I hope they let Adams remain a redhead. But speaking of hair color, I remember a few months ago I was flipping through a magazine and there was a little blurb about Blake Lively being in Green Lantern and she recounted how a security guard told her he feared for her safety if she didn't dye her hair dark. I don't know if he was exaggerating for dramatic effect but apparently some fans regard hair color as SRS BZNS? (It also makes me wonder how these fans would react to a change in skin color.)