Review of The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? (2015) by Martin I — 22 Jul 2015

A delightfully exhaustive and comprehensive look at one of the most infamous movies NEVER made. SUPERMAN LIVES is such a storied project that some might think all the good anecdotes have been told, but this documentary proves that is far from true.

The film contains a true treasure trove of material, including endless pieces of striking concept art, behind-the-scenes footage, costume and screen tests, and surprisingly frank interviews from everyone from most of the biggest people who worked on the film, to comic industry giants, to peripheral players who were just fans of the material.

Producer Jon Peters has always seemed like the weird man behind the curtain of this aborted project, and he does seem a little idiosyncratic (to say the least) in his interview here, but he also comes across as a pretty good sport, not too defensive and mostly owning his more questionable impulses.

Writer/director/host Jon Schnepp makes for an engaging guide for all this, never inserting himself into the doc to the extent that it becomes about him, but rather jumping in to kind of interpret some of the things we're seeing and hearing.

All in all, the documentary ultimately reveals that SUPERMAN LIVES would have been both hugely ambitious and monumentally strange; there would have been nothing else like it.