Treatments to make his story work in the modern age

Face it, he's Mickey Mouse. A product of a by-gone era. Somehow Marvel made Captain America relevant to the times though, yet everyone can't seem to get Supes right. What is the correct formula for him?

I would personally place more emphasis on the refugee aspect on his "alien refugee" story, effectively making it Alien Nation with Kryptonians escaping a war on their planet. (Yes, it has to be a war, the mythos must be altered. Purists will be butthurt but refugee issues are so relevant to today's society that even kids would understand and relate to it more than "sole survivor baby from a destroyed planet" schtick, which is biblical and all but nobody in the modern day gives a shit about the bible anymore).

With a spaceship full of Kryptonians, you immediately have a Superman family for sequels. They become superheroes/ meta humans on earth. Naturally, some of the refugees have not-so-good intentions for the humans as an inferior species and wish to subjugate them etc.. Cue: power level porn/ Dragonball-style battles between the Kryptonians. Humans fight back, create their own metahumans etc to fight back. Superman steps up to try and police his villainous brethren in a bid to restore the trust of his adopted species. The costume can be his way of sucking up to America too, as would his wholesome, all-American persona, an artifice that all refugees go through.

In essence, Superman's story would parallel the plight of refugees and mirror the mistrust a society has for them. Snyder touched on this very lightly when it could have been the main theme.

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Fuck no. Holy fucking shit no.

The alien aspect to Superman is essentially why people don't like him. No matter how you spin it, it becomes difficult to care about a godlike alien who picks and chooses what good deeds he can do.

The only "change" his story needs is to go back to the Golden Age roots. Since you're specifically talking about live-action, then we can even go back to "able to leap tall buildings" instead of flying:

* Make him massively less powerful. But, to be specific, limit the effectiveness of superhearing and x-ray vision. Don't allow him to be a "I can see radio waves!" kind of guy.

* Super jumping and limited gliding with the cape. No flying.

If Kryptonian elements are brought in (and I don't think they should be), then they should be simple as fuck or alien as fuck. Who gives a shit about "problems that Earth people have....but on a different planet!"? The most interesting element of Krypton was when it was this super advanced society which was "doomed" to be destroyed, yet almost everyone chose to stay and die. That seems way fucking cooler than wars and politics and every other thing that's happening now.

This all sounds fucking awful.

Just adapt more or less Birthright, that's the perfect modern Superman movie.

>Cue: power level porn/ Dragonball-style battles
Stopped reading there.

>Who gives a shit about "problems that Earth people have....but on a different planet!"?
Star Trek fans.

Just get rid of the stupid exposed red underwear already. Geez!!!

All those words just to say a bunch of stupid, uninformed bullshit. Reevaluate your life, OP.

It's been gone for 6 years...

Just throwing ideas around to see what sticks, which is what everybody has been doing with no luck. Do you have a treatment? It's pretty much what the thread's for, chief.

OP, your idea sucks.

They should just make a movie that is unconventionally but still quintessentially Superman. No origin shit, nothing like that. Have him land on a blue sun planet for some reason, maybe he drifts there after a huge space fight that knocks him out. The planet is under the thumb of Darkseid and is being run by Kalibak, and a non-powered Superman helps the enslaved people rise up with all that truth, justice, murica stuff. Third act has the major confrontation, the enslaved people versus parademons, Superman versus Kalibak, and an almost dead Superman gets saved when it turns out the planet is in a binary star system, and the other star is yellow. Superman kicks Kalibak's teeth in, he retreats, Superman leaves, cue mid-credit Darkseid scene.

In my mind, the only way to make a good Superman movie in this day and age is to basically treat it like you would an episode of the JLU cartoon. Everything else has failed. Sincerity has failed, origins have failed, mythology has failed, deconstructing the secret identity thing has failed... Just make it like the fucking cartoons, but live action.

>Face it, he's Mickey Mouse.
Stopped reading right there because the recent Mickey Mouse cartoons have been great.

>What is the correct formula for him?
Truth, Justice, and the American way.

It's not hard to grasp, yet no one wants to pick it up.

>Just throwing ideas around to see what sticks, which is what everybody has been doing with no luck.

And that's precisely why they've failed. They need to stay true to what the character is.

>, yet everyone can't seem to get Supes right.
Because they keep thinking he needs fixing, like you. You're that guy that goes "round wheels are so OLD and busted!" and then wonders why nobody wants to invest in your cutting edge brand new square ones.

>Everything has failed

Superman Returns is lame and boring, and Man of Steel is just not very good. They didn't really try to make a really good modern Superman movie.

>Somehow Marvel made Captain America relevant to the times though, yet everyone can't seem to get Supes right.

Because Marvel just let Cap be Cap, they didn't get all self-conscious about it and try to fix what wasn't broken. Whereas WB/DC has done more or less the opposite with Superman.

Superman struggles in popularity because people approach him as broken and in need of repair instead of emphasizing what makes the character work in the first place.

Superman's fine and people would be fine with Superman if that's what they actually got instead of all this other bullshit.

No that's retarded if you want to write about refugees you don't need to fuck an existing character to do it.

Your ideas suck. Kill yourself you autistic neckbeard faggot

What if you had to play by the rules though, ie: make him relatable. What angle would you take?

Ironman and Cap's movies translate so well in the modern age. Was Stan Lee just a better storyteller? Because you can't really do "all-powerful hero with all the bestest powers" story and make it engaging enough. Not unless it's a screwball comedy that shows him pulling doors out of their hinges whenever he opens them and other implications one would experience as a super being in a planet ill-equipped to facilitate his needs.

I thought the animated series did a good job of things.

Take away inculnerability. It's hard to make him look good when he's not in danger

ok here's a good new origin for the modern age that i've been thinking of, ready?

Nn alien planet explodes and a scientist sends his son to earth to save him from the explosion. There that baby is found by farmer parents who bring him up to be a kind hearted person. Because of his upbringing the baby grows up with the urge to help people and moves to a metropolitan city and takes up journalism to give him more access to crimes and other situations where he can help. Give him some sort of costume with a cape or some shit. I know my ideas might be radical but I think you'll find that they work in these modern times.

Fuck

Good lord.

Cap translates well because there not trying to fix what's not broken.

>make him relatable.
Taking away his powers and forcing him to think about his own mortality in times of peril isn't relatable? It's literally one of the only ways to actually make him relatable, other than with the deaths of others around him.

Did you catch any Pokemon today?

Your hired

You can't write a compelling character whose core aspect is "strong as he needs to be"

You mean a Red sun.
A blue sun is like steroids to kryptonians.

Every character is strong as he needs to be. Otherwise they wouldn't never beat their enemies.

>Was Stan Lee just a better storyteller?
You mean Jack Kirby.

Hasn't worked since the Christopher Reeve era though. It needs fresher, finger-on-the-pulse ideas that would make it fit to compete with Marvel in a cinematic storytelling capacity.

See
Man of Steel didn't "fail" because of its ideas, it was because it was a poorly paced movie that failed to let the audience get to know the character, and was up its own ass with the Jesus imagery stuff that went nowhere.

In fact MoS could very easily be an excellent Superman movie with only two or three new scenes and a better editing job.

Fucking Mars niggers

>you can't really do "all-powerful hero with all the bestest powers" story and make it engaging enough.

Except writers have been doing it just fine for decades and decades. Stop talking shit.

Semantics. Beside the point.

You know what, faggot?

...

You're right, good catch.

Edgy

I disagree. I don't think there's a way to fix the tornado scene and in general the focus is on the wrong aspects of the character.

What Snyder and OP both don't understand is that Clark Kent is an immigrant/adoption success story. He's not haunted by the ghosts of Krypton. He doesn't even really identify as alien. He's not lost and looking for his home and his people. He HAS them already. That's why he works to protect Earth; because from his earliest memories that's been the only home he's known and loved.

In what, the Hancock movie? That turned out great. Hulk stand-alone movies are failures. Citation needed, Einstein.

Good morals and earnest storytelling are so outdated.

That's actually a good angle. It'd be hard avoiding the schmaltziness in the message though.

Sounds like a pretty good story for a different character entirely.

Also, god, with "refugee" being basically a slur these days everyone would accuse it of political pandering. I mean, just try to say you have sympathy for refugees in a German bar and see what happens.

Yeah they really are. Which is the only reason this generation identified with narcissist Tony Stark so much.

Writers of Superman comics, not movies.

Jesus Christ I don't know who's idea is worse - yours or the Op's

>Somehow Marvel made Captain America relevant to the times though

MCU Cap is entirely bland though. He's only relevant due to being part of a successful film franchise.

I figured with everything that happened in Bastille Day in France and how some of refugees allegedly, are to blame, the story of Supes fighting against rogue, hostile (ie: jihadist) Kryptonians in an uphill battle to restore their good name would resonate more.

Nah, the culprit in France was a French-Tunesian. What everyone neglects to mention is that what happens in France is the result of racial tensions that have existed for longer than the IS does. Not that religious extremism doesn't play a major part in it but it shouldn't be reduced to that entirely.

People generally prefer Cap

His ideas are good though. A golden age adaption of Super Man would he awesome.

Ok cool. So we're in the WB executive boardroom during crisis mode and they're asking you to pitch ideas and you say "nothing needs changing". God help you.

superman is so fucking simple that it's sad nobody gets it. Clark Kent is a good guy, he was raised to be a good guy, he knows what you do to be a good guy. He's all American home cooked food farm boy style guy but he also has to be a god. He'd rather just be a good person but now he's an adult and has to deal with adult problems except like crazy exaggerated.

Don't quit your day job.

We're not a bunch of cocksucking marketers. What we have are decades of great comics that prove your claims are retarded and ignorant.

How about instead of asking people to reinvent him for you, you go read some fucking comics for inspiration?

This is literally the way you would go with Superman, to focus on his humanity and to grow through the troubles he faces. Why are people so retarded and try to make up these complex issues when all you really need to do is make him feel human - even though he's really an alien?

>He's not haunted by the ghosts of Krypton. He doesn't even really identify as alien.

Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar would disagree with you. And they wrote the best Superman stories ever.

That's how the character was in the Silver Age, though. Millar think they've broken him since COIE and the Pre-Crisis version was absolutely more interesting.

Yeah, but you know how easy it is to blame the refugees for society's ills. They could seriously pounce on this and do a subtle art imitating life allegory and make a commentary on it. As a refugee, Superman is the perfect vehicle to address this issue.

He literally shouted Allahu Ackbar before he died. He was also trafficking many guns and explosives which were found inside of the truck. Don't pretend this had nothing to do with IS, because it's all linked with the past, present, and future.

I think Martian Manhunter would fit the role much better. Superman was just a baby when he came here, J'onn was an adult who had spent his whole life in Martian culture with a Martian family.

Maybe. Here's what it boils down to though: be relevant, or your movie will flop. If your movie flops, no more superman movies for 20 years. If the entire world understands the character, they will want to buy movie tickets to Part 2. Then you get more movies, a fracnchise, then a cinematic universe with a cohesive narrative.

>Somehow Marvel made Captain America relevant to the times though
No. Marvel just made movies with funny jokes. And in your eyes, that makes him "relevant".

I literally wrote that religious extremism does play a major part in it. I would be the last to defend religion and the special treatment it gets in Western Europe. We should put less emphasis on Freedom of Religion and more on Freedom from Religion.

I don't know why they try to adapt these but wel know stories when the lite sweet ones are usually the best. Cavil can be saved if he's ok in the JL movie. Then I would have a two year skip of Superman just doing great deeds and heroic things across the world and fighting some crazy monsters and silver shit and then make a "There Must Be A Superman" movie using Maggins' story as the basis.

Well that's why I'm calling for a change to update the character. We could humanise refugees through him and make a period movie that actually matters. Snyder's "gods amongst men" angle isn't really saying anything of consequence and won't matter in the long term. The current movies are adequate as a piece of entertainment but ultimately forgettable.

Cap's second movie had a lot to say about privacy and national security actually. It could have been about Red Skull returning with Frost Giants and using them as bio weapons to fight cap in the modern day and taken the full fantasy route, but it chose to be relevant, and tackle relevant issues.

People stayed on Krypton because nobody thought it would explode/nobody believed Jor-El. The only reason for him and Lara staying was because they couldn't fit in Kal-El's baby pod.
How difficult is it for people to grasp that?

Start it with Of Thee I Sing then the Morrison jumper story then end it with There must Be a Superman and that's a beautiful film
get the dude who directed Midnight Special to do it

I'm a Supes fan but, why did they only make a tiny baby pod and not family pods if they're so advanced?

They tried that and we got Murderfaceman

Read the comics.

Indulge me, please. There's quite a few of those.

In the original GA stories, it's not really explained, it's a just "because plot device" so that he was the only survivor, when they did get around to telling his origin story, mostly for the daily newspaper strip, which eventually got used in the comics magazines (as they were then called).

This user is correct as to the GA origin ; later on, it got adjusted a bit that the pod COULD have fit Lara but she chose to stay on Kyrpton with Jor.

They didn't make a family pod because the pods were experimental ones that Jor was trying to make. It also goes with the later versions of the tale where Krypton had stronger than Earth gravity and it took a lot more power to escape it's gravity well for space travel, one of the reasons that Krypton, while advance, didn't engage in space exploration and didn't already have a fleet of space ships. THAT also later got adjusted to Kryptonians HAD, during one of the 'great ages,' engaged in space travel but for multiple reasons, found it caused domestic problems or interstellar relation problems and were not space travelers in Jor's time frame.

The size of the space pod is also a rationale for Krypto when he was introduced in the Silver Ages (when they started populating the Super Books with all sorts of Kryptonians) because HIS space pod was also 'baby sized' because these pods were test pods for a later fleet to evacuate the Kryptonian population - Jor tested it out on an animal at first, the same way humans were doing for space flight in the space age - but didn't get approval/didn't get around to creating the space fleet.

Ah, thank you very much. I had assumed something like that.

This is what Kevin Costners scenes were about and I have to say, they were a weak point. The movie fell flat whenever he gave the contradictory "be a good guy... but don't save people or they'll hate you" flashback spiel. Maybe let the farmboy angle go?

Michael Bay and the entirety of his output would disagree with you, with a world-wide gross for his movies based on crappy toys making $3.75 billion plus alone:

boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=transformers.htm

No, in that case I say "We need to go back to basics". Guys like you talk about how Superman doesn't work in the modern world but most of the shit you look at isn't a reflection of Modern Superman at all.
Superman Returns was a retro throwback by a guy that, by his own admission, didn't like the character and only got into it via the Donner movies.
Smallville was a teen drama with a strict "no capes, no flying" rule.
Snyderverse is a deconstruction. And don't fucking claim it isn't when the Snyders themselves are admitting as much in order to convince people to see Justice League.
The ONE time in the last 20 years someone gave an honest and genuine try at rendering Superman was the DCAU and lo and behold it was a huge fucking success.

>but don't save people or they'll hate you
THIS is what was the weakness in the Kevin Costner's scenes (which would include the weird dream sequence from the last movie as well as Ma Kent's Costernesque speech to Clark from it as well).

This is the take that the comic books and some of the animated movies/series have taken since COIE. That Superman is, perhaps, the most human of the DC Pantheon, extended JL, etc. and was the whole point of the weird 'conceived on Krypton but BORN' on Earth aspects of the birthing matrix.

"Farm" and 'midwest' are just simplifications for 'salt of the Earth,' 'basic (good) humanity' type values - it doesn't have to be a farm but especially now, with all the back to nature/organic movements in the first world, still make it a relevant origin story. IT isn't the problem.

I think you misunderstand what it is you think you misunderstand and it's just your own feelings about Kal-El. Movies like GotG and the Star Wars franchise are proof positive that people will pay good money and go in large numbers/buy DVDs/pirate shit based on space travel, other planets, etc., even those which are not fully humanoid based species.

Given that we have any number of people who fly as a power, that's not really the issue. An adaptation of Morrison and/or the Fleischer serial animated films would be a good starting point for an origin film, but the last thing Superman needs today is another origin story in live action.

Let's stop resting on the laurels of such benchmarks though. Plus, everybody gets Transformers because it's easy to get. A car that can turn into a robot, I'm sold, two tickets please. Easy. To this day, I still don't get what Superman's deal is. Masculinity, check. Tragedy, I'm the last of my kind, check. This businessman is my arch enemy that I can't seem to make go away because I'm obeying the laws of this planet, check. Also, I'm a Judeo-Christ figure, check. Etc.. So many things define him. That may be a good thing, but may also be to its detriment, as it creates difficulty in finding the focus of a definitive story.

You're right. You don't get what his deal is.

Superman's masculinity is innate, not an overt character trope. Tragedy doesn't really define him like it does so many others.

Let me see if I can put it this way. Batman views his sidekicks and fellow superheroes as soldiers in a war. Superman views them as friends / co-workers he can go out for bowling and burgers with.
Superman, more than any other superhero (except maybe the Flash), is the blue collar everyman guy that just wants to do good. All other trappings are secondary to this. What matters about Superman is that he's an earnest, moral guy. This is the part that his critics seem to think is "hokey and old fashioned" (to put it lightly). It's always the part they try and mess with when you get down to it as well, hence you get guys like Snyder that go "oh but he can't save everyone and people need to hate him and he needs to be tortured by it".

Superman is one of those characters with q strong enough personality that, even if you took away his powers and his alien origin and all that stuff, you could still buy him becoming a firefighter or EMT or something like that. And a story that says that those are complicated and morally ambiguous fields needs to fuck right off.

>Face it, he's Mickey Mouse. A product of a by-gone era.
Stopped reading. Go read "What's So Wrong With Truth Justice And The American Way" and then get back to us.

Then let him die.
If he doesn't work why do you want him to continue? If you have to alter him into something else so he can appeal to modern audiences why not simply abandon him and make a new story?
At worst you're just trying to leech of a successful character to carry your new product. At best you're just admitting you don't know how to write a successful character but would rather blame the character for your own shortcomings.

>If you have to alter him into something else so he can appeal to modern audiences why not simply abandon him and make a new story?

There's more money in making something familiar to people than making something completely new.

And the reason all of these things are made is money.

Well that's pretty much exactly what I said, I don't get his deal. I think symbolically, he's a lot of different things to a lot of different people. A gym junkie type sees him as a symbol for masculinity, boom, T-shirt sales, sup Instagram I'm a superhero. Females see him as a Prince Charming figure, boom, movie tickets sold in pairs. Kids see him as a cartoon character that fights bank robbers.. etc.. To the patriot, he symbolises the American Way, wholsomeness and doing good deeds. Everybody simplifies him to their understanding of the character. Digesting all that, it's hard to come up with anything definitive to the point of Transformers' "car that turns into a robot" basic pitch, other than "Superman is a symbol".

meme

What did the Winter Soldier have to as something relevant to say again?

At the end of the day, everything boiled down to Hydra being evil again.

*say

Because it's a puzzle with an answer and I'm intrigued with how to solve it. I marvelled (=D) at how they pulled something as ridiculous as Thor off by taking the Shakespearan/ Lord of the Rings angle to fill that particular niche. If they can tell that story and make it palatable to the point of having him co-exist with Ironman and Hulk without anyone questioning why the shit a Norse god is playing party games with his hammer with them, then I think Superman can be made to work too.

Drone warfare.

>Made Thor Work
Call me when they do.

He was very sceptical and mistrustful of the government, which I think we all are. It had Wikileaks undertones to it. America is a different place to the one he left behind when he was frozen and the movie explored exactly how different.

For sheer entertainment value, it works. Dark World's villain was overshadowed by the screwball comedic elements to it. The franchise is very obviously geared at the British market with its dry sense of humour.

>dry sense of humour.
Darcy's existence begs to differ on that.

>The franchise is very obviously geared at the British market with its dry sense of humour.

Yes, old chap, I too got a right sensible chuckle out of "mew mew".

So you get Thor's deal? Or you get Peter Lord's and Groots and a talking feral space animal?

100K plus issues of the Superman Rebirth story were sold, that's not counting digital downloads and pirated copies. Likewise, every issue of the Superman Unchained special sold 100K plus. That you don't get something isn't that the character is no longer relevant. The fact that someone made a film that doesn't get the character either isn't a reason to want to redo as much as OP or the second response have in mind.

Can't win'em all. But that scene where Thor is in the tube and the blonde pretends to fall just so she can touch his chest is some straight Benny Hill shit bro

Well, you gotta find the right angle so that everyone's on the same page. That's what I meant by "getting it". Here's a challenge: summarise Superman, (ie: the general gist of either the character, though preferably the myth/ legend of) in 5 words or less. Bonus points if you can do it in 3 words.

Truth Justice American Way