That James McTeigue is a real blabber mouth when it comes to the red & blue boyscout. The rumor has been out there for months that he or his buddies, The Wachowskis, were next in line to helm some sort of reboot for the Man of Steel. For his part, McTeigue certainly hasn't tried to squash these rumors. In fact, he's perpetuated them to some extent. When FirstShowing.net pressed McTeigue on the possibility of directing Superman, he had this to say...
"Maybe some truth to… I've had some discussions, the Wachowskis to a lesser degree, but the Superman franchise is in a strange kind of place at the moment," he said. "I think they're still trying to work out the mechanics of how that can come together."
To me that sounds like an A-OK positive reading. However he had a lot more to say when asked about what he'd do if given the director's chair...
"I think I would be interested in doing it if they let me do it the way I wanted to do it. I would say that, if you take the Richard Donner Supermans and the last Superman [from Bryan Singer], I think that Superman is probably ripe for a bit of a change up. I think society has changed around the core idea of what Superman was."
"And I'm not saying you do the ubiquitous dark Superman, I'm not saying that… I'm just saying that I think there are some things that you could excise from the Superman mythology that people would get into it, if you took the world that he was in and changed that a bit, and maybe even project that into the future a bit. I think you don't really have to play into the origin story anymore. I think there's a whole bunch of things you could do to make that film more alive and exciting again."
I like his take on it, even if I don't agree with all of it. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with the Superman origin or premise. It's all about presentation. Superman's chief problem has always been how he is portrayed. He's either aloof or a friggin' boyscout. It's like those who write him are scared to show him with real human emotions, like anger and jealousy, as if he's above that sort of thing. Those are the problems with Superman. Even though Superman Returns was a critically panned dead weight, it's box office shows that people have a genuine interest in seeing the Man of Steel. They just need to find an angle that will keep him fresh without thumbing a nose at what makes him unique.
