Superman IV: In his book, Christopher Reeve remembered the moment he realized the Quest for Peace was doomed
Earlier this week, when I posted my Superman review, someone on X asked me where the movie ranked in the pantheon of Superman movies. Even though I didn’t like it as much as many others did, I must admit it’s a million times better than some of the other Superman movies out there, as the series really did go down the toilet at one point during the eighties. The fourth Superman film might actually rank as one of the worst movies ever. This aspect wasn’t lost on its leading man, Christopher Reeve, who wrote about the miserable experience in his memoir, Still Me, which was written in the aftermath of his tragic horse riding accident. Calling the movie embarrassing, he said that he saw it once at the premiere and never again.
As he explains, the movie was done-in by the fact that Cannon, the studio producing the film, had many other movies in production at the time, and was losing money hand over fist. At the eleventh hour, the budget was cut from $30-36 million to $17 million. Reeve, who admits that he only did the movie to get a passion project of his, Street Smart (opposite an Oscar-nominated Morgan Freeman) made, wrote about the moment he knew the film was doomed.
“Konner and Rosenthal (the writers) wrote a scene in which Superman lands on 42nd Street and walks down the double yellow lines to the United Nations, where he gives a speech. If that had been a scene in Superman I, we would actually have shot it on 42nd Street. Richard Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street like the Pied Piper. Instead, we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere.”
As bad as whatever ended up on screen in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was, the deleted scenes are even worse and must be seen to be believed. For more on this misbegotten movie, check out this episode of Awfully Good we did on it:
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