In 1978, the world was still in the grip of Star Wars fever — so how did everyone react
when the Man of Steel himself hit theaters?
Keep watching to find out.
Even though Superman had never featured in a big-budget movie before, he was still an
icon; one who had appeared in nearly every other medium imaginable.
Over the previous 40 years, viewers had built up a very definite image of who the Man of
Steel was, and that meant the movie had a lot to live up to.
The producers turned that handicap into an asset the same way MGM had with Gone with
the Wind decades earlier — by promoting Superman with a hyped-up global talent search.
Warner Brothers was so determined to get the movie right that they spent two years on the
casting search, which was almost as long as the rest of the production put together.
The whole process was so public that Roger Ebert made sure to mention it in his contemporary
review, and though Hollywood had done this often enough to make him skeptical, he wrote:
"Although 'talent searches' are usually 100% horse feathers, this time, for once, they
actually found the right guy."
Christopher Reeve had never appeared in a movie before, but according to producer Ilya
Salkind, he won out over hundreds of other unknowns, as well as superstars like Paul
Newman, Steve McQueen, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Superman hit the screen at just the right moment in film history.
It began pre-production at a bearish time for sci-fi blockbusters: Hollywood was still
recovering from its near-collapse in the '60s, and the few hits it managed to pull out were
mostly dark dramas like The Exorcist and The Godfather.
As for science fiction, audiences mostly had to choose between two flavors.
B-movie makers were filling drive-ins with cheap, silly adventures full of laughable
effects and silly performances.
"Don't be afraid."
Meanwhile, their upmarket competitors were making more polished products, but these tended
to be grim, philosophical movies like Soylent Green and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There wasn't much in between.
The year before Superman made it to theaters, however, another movie changed the whole game.
Star Wars shattered records by combining an old-fashioned space opera with newfangled
effects technology.
It proved moviegoers were ready to have fun again to the tune of hundreds of millions
of dollars, and that's not even counting the film's absolutely massive merchandising takings.
Audiences wanted more, and while other studios scrambled to cash in, Superman offered the
perfect movie to tide them over while they waited for Star Wars 2.
Warner Bros. even poached the Star Wars crew for talent to bring their own vision to life,
including the now-iconic composer John Williams.
Warner Bros. knew what they had with Superman, and they didn't want to miss out on any potential
viewers — so the studio made sure everybody and their mother knew the Man of Steel was
coming to a theater near them.
MacLean's reported on the movie's marketing just before it came out in their appropriately
named 'Superhype' cover story.
According to the magazine:
"Warner Brothers estimates that North Americans will have had seven billion chances, through
print, radio, and TV advertising, to have heard about [Superman]."
MacLean's placed the movie's advertising budget somewhere between $6 million to $7 million
— over $26 million in today's money.
The story even runs down a few of the tie-ins that were available at the time, from books
and T-shirts to toys and some stranger items, such as trash cans.
It's hard to imagine a scenario in which all that investment wouldn't pay off, but it was
a very real possibility.
In the MacLean's piece, writer Ivor Davis reflects on past movies where things went
wrong, including a remake of King Kong and the Great Gatsby adaptation starring Robert
Redford.
These movies had equally massive ad campaigns and equally safe-bet source material, but
failed to reach the sky-high profit margins the hype men dreamed of.
Superheroes had moved off the printed page and into the movies before 1978.
After so many decades of silver screen crimefighters, however, it can be hard to imagine the impact
Superman had when it hit theaters.
Live-action superheroes have been around almost as long as their comics counterparts, starting
with '40s serials based on Captain Marvel, Batman, and Superman himself.
But Hollywood didn't have enough faith in the source material to give these projects
the kind of resources they would in 1978, let alone now.
Instead, viewers got baggy costumes, cardboard sets, and laughable plots that barely resembled
those found in the comics.
Until Superman, the biggest splash superheroes had made in the media was in 1966 with the
Batman TV show starring Adam West.
"Holy hole in a donut!"
But that couldn't be more different from what director Richard Donner did with Superman.
Batman wasn't an adaptation so much as an officially approved parody, goofing on the
whole idea of superheroes by exaggerating their wackiest aspects.
And by the '70s, TV superheroing had moved on to shows like Wonder Woman and The Incredible
Hulk, which were less explicitly comedic but still full of soapy silliness.
Audiences probably expected more of the same from Superman, but that's not what they got
at all.
The film treats Superman as serious business and gives his adventures far more grandeur
that other live-action heroes had enjoyed up to that point.
Anyone who ever got seriously invested in the straight-faced superhero flicks of later
decades owes Donner a very large debt indeed.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars made it possible to bring moviegoers
a whole new kind of Superman.
Earlier versions had left a lot to be desired in the special effects department, of course.
The movie serials of the '40s had suddenly transitioned to animation for the flying scenes,
and in the '50s TV show, actor George Reeves hung from a wire while a fan blew in his face.
It took until 1977 for the movies to finally catch up with fans' imaginations, and the
filmmakers pulled out all the stops to make it work.
The flying scenes on Superman required a combination of matte effects, camera trickery, complicated
rigs, and physical stunt work — in the form of having to hang Christopher Reeve up in
the air, sometimes as high as 50 feet.
The marketing team summed up the film crew's accomplishment in a simple phrase that everyone
in America knew by heart by the time the movie premiered: "You'll believe a man can fly."
There were plenty of other impressive effects too; Superman lifted the innovations of Star
Wars to create a miniature planet Krypton and a crystalline Fortress of Solitude that
look just as real as Tatooine or the Death Star.
But that tagline sums up everything that makes Superman work as a movie.
Suddenly, the sight of a live actor as a comic book hero, tights and all, was a cause for
awe instead of laughter.
When Superman was released, audiences were ready for some good old-fashioned fun.
Star Wars had revived the long-dead space opera genre, of course.
But it also self-consciously nodded at the movies of the past with techniques such as
the wipe transition and an opening crawl borrowed from the serials of George Lucas' childhood.
Lucas would later lean on those retro influences again in his story for Steven Spielberg's
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Superman was part of that same zeitgeist.
The special effects were downright futuristic in 1978, and Donner used them to make a deeply
old-fashioned story fresh again.
That's certainly how Roger Ebert felt at the time, writing:
"Superman is a pure delight, a wondrous combination of all the old-fashioned things we never really
get tired of: adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earthshaking special effects,
and — you know what else?
Wit."
Donner self-consciously leaned into that aspect of Superman, calling on classic stars like
veteran Western hero Glenn Ford as Pa Kent and former Little Rascal Jackie Cooper as
Perry White.
And the scenes of Superman's youth in Smallville, Kansas, are self-consciously timeless, with
classic cars and settings that could've come out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
As Clark Kent, Superman still wears the same blue suit and fedora he had in the '40s, and
while his coworkers may be more fashionable, the atmosphere at the Daily Planet nevertheless
evokes the classic newspaper movies of yore.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to imagine that Superman was anything but a super
safe bet.
But that wasn't how audiences felt in 1978.
The movie represented an enormous investment with its high-tech effects and all-star cast,
not to mention the millions upon millions of dollars Warner Bros. poured into the ad
campaign.
All this for a movie in a genre that didn't really exist yet, too, and had only really
proven its viability in other media.
No doubt, the fate of Superman was up in the air until the final box office tallies came
rolling in.
In the MacLean's article about the movie, it was discussed how Warner Bros. might share
the profits of the movie.
The article mentions that fact is only relevant "if the movie takes off" and calls that "the
biggest if in movie history."
It goes on to say the consequences of a super flop could be dire, since Warner Communications
had been caught in the stock market crash of 1973.
In the piece, MacLean's quotes an executive who reassures them that the company is turning
a steady profit in many sectors, but they still conclude:
"The money from a successful movie and from all the merchandising could make all the difference."
Apparently, it did — Warner Communications, now AT&T WarnerMedia, is bigger than ever,
and Superman is still a major part of their plans.
"I coulda had class, I coulda been a contender.
I coulda been somebody.”
Superman had plenty of star power even beyond the name recognition of its fictional hero,
and no star in the cast was bigger than Marlon Brando.
Previously, Brando had defined '50s youth culture and the new school of method acting
in early hits such as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire.
And he was bigger than ever in 1978, after his Oscar-winning performance in the blockbuster
gangster epic The Godfather.
That meant the ads for Superman made sure to put his involvement in the movie front
and center.
Viewers could even be forgiven for thinking he was the star.
So they must've gotten a rude awakening when, after a brief Brando-centric prologue, he
disappears for most of the movie, only making a few more appearances as a recording to mentor
his son.
Altogether, he only gets about 20 minutes of screen time, and he knocked out the whole
job in less than two weeks.
Of course, at the height of his fame, Brando was able to command a hefty payday for a few
days' work, and with Superman he scored over $3 million and 11.75% of all the movie's future
profits.
No wonder Warner Bros. wanted to make the most of their investment by hyping up the
star's involvement.
The producers behind Superman had a lot of faith in their movie, and so they made an
unprecedented gamble on its success.
Before they even knew for sure that one Superman movie could sell, they committed themselves
to two, filming both the film and its sequel simultaneously.
That may not seem unusual now that every major movie gets at least a sequel or two, but in
1978, it was unheard of.
Star Wars was still just a single movie in 1978, and only a few films had ever been successfully
franchised.
And most of those few, like the James Bond and Godzilla franchises, were pretty clearly
making things up as they went.
The closest precedent was The Godfather Part II, and there's a huge difference between
a character-driven historical epic and an action franchise.
But Superman did learn from The Godfather, no doubt because the two series shared a screenwriter
in Mario Puzo.
Like Puzo's other movies, and unlike previous franchises, Superman treated both movies as
one big story.
A long sequence at the beginning deals with Terence Stamp as the Kryptonian criminal General
Zod, who wouldn't become important until Superman II.
If the sequel had never been made, it's easy to imagine audiences scratching their heads
over what he was even doing there.
Granted, some behind-the-scenes drama eventually forced director Richard Donner to focus on
just the first film, and he was ousted when it came time to finish part two.
But even if Superman didn't quite invent the sequel teaser, it came close.
And audiences apparently ate it up — Superman II was the number one movie in the world when
it hit theaters in 1981.
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