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We may be positioned in the midpoint of the year, but for thousands of fanboys and fangirls July is Christmas. After all, like the yuletide season, the legendary San Diego Comic-Con arrives just once a year (they’re also both heavily populated by elves and overweight men with beards, but that’s neither here nor there). Much like the promised arrival of Santa will have children of all ages across the world hopping from foot to foot on December 24th, this July 5th saw anticipation in the celebrated Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center reach fever pitch. LucasFilm were in the house, and Star Wars discussion was on the menu (for the record, if you happened to miss the ballyhoo you can catch up here). Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (we’ll willingly pay ten dollars to anyone who actually asks for that at the box office as opposed to ‘Star Wars’) is surely the most anticipated movie of 2015 – quite the boast in a year that saw a return to Isla Nebula and the reunion of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Somehow, however, the Skywalkers didn’t Quite manage to steal to the show at San Diego’s celebration of all things geek; that honor went to DC and Time Warner, with the extended trailer for the impending Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (seriously, what’s with the tongue-crampingly long titles, Hollywood?), and first look at supervillain jamboree Suicide Squad getting us foaming at mouth. I’ll be honest, this is the first time since it’s announcement that I have been genuinely excited about Batman v. Superman. Unlike most I considered the casting of Batfleck to be a masterstroke, but I simply could not stand Man of Steel (in the unlikely even that you’re interested in why, you can read my first-run review here), and feared more of the same fudged handling. It would appear that Zack Snyder and David Goyer have managed to turn around their missteps though (maybe there is a reason they are producing mega-budget movies and I’m not), using the gratuitous and uncharacteristic wholesale destruction caused by the big blue boy scout in his first outing as building blocks for an entire cinematic universe. Now that’s how to make lemonade from a £225m lemon. Here’s the thing, though; it could have all been so very different. The Man of Tomorrow has arguably endured more false starts in the movies than any other cherished fictional character, and none more fascinating than the aborted Tim Burton/Nicolas Cage collaboration Superman Lives, which was anticipated to soar into a very different landscape for cinema superheroics back in 1998. The whole sorry saga of this Kryponian catastrophe (a cautionary tale about producer power if ever there was one) is discussed at great length in the new feature-length documentary The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?, which can be now watched on VOD as well as purchased on home video. I ordered myself a copy, and can’t recommend the movie highly enough – it’s a fascinating, no-holds-barred look at a freQuently painful process with input from all the major players in the movie-that-never-was bar Cage himself, with concepts and decisions so irredeemably crazy that they will make your teeth hurt. Perhaps if the film was made a little earlier lessons could have been learned, and the landscape would not be littered with Quite so many DC adaptations that never Quite made their way to the screen. The grounding of Superman Lives did little to dispel the Tinseltown legend of The Curse of Superman. Many consider the part to be a poisoned chalice after George Reeves committed suicide (or did he? Check out the hugely underrated Hollywoodland for a fascinating collection of conspiracies), Christopher Reeve suffered his eventually fatal riding accident, and Dean Cain’s career failed to reach the highs expected after his stint in the tights (a fate he would later share with fellow thesps Brandon Routh and Tom Welling). The jinx shows no sign of abating either, with Henry Cavill clearly afflicted with a terrible, Gorgon-esque condition that is slowly turning a flesh-and-blood man into solid oak, but hope springs eternal. Curses count for nothing where is money to be made, however, and long before Bryan Singer finally made Superman Returns a reality (a flick which receives quite the kicking, but is a personal favorite of your humble narrator – I wrote a passionate defense of this red-haired stepchild of spandex sensations here) plans were afoot to make us believe a man could fly once more. The entire landscape of spandex cinema could have been very different if a JJ Abrams-penned script named Flyby, which began turnaround back in 2002, made it to the screen. Brett Ratner was attached as director before vacating the seat thanks to creative differences, which terrifyingly paving the way for master of disaster McG. Thankfully Singer eventually took the helm after a long and tortured pre- production and casting process – leading to a bizarre game of musical chairs, in which Singer walked away from X-Men: The Last Stand in favor of helming Clark Kent’s return to the screen, only to be replaced by Ratner – and Superman lived up to his promise and Returned. Flyby is a fascinating case of how things can change in a decade. The movie went into production during a time when Abrams was not trusted to helm a major franchise picture; a time when Paul Walker, Josh Hartnett and Brendan Fraser were big enough stars to be approached for the role and offered squillions of dollars alongside the security of multi-picture contracts (Ratner originally envisioned his Superman tale as a trilogy), but felt confident enough in their careers to decline; a time when Amy Adams auditioned for Lois Lane and was told thanks but no thanks. Some of the other casting rumors were also a combination of the divine and ridiculous, including Christopher Walken as Perry White, Scarlett Johansson as Lois, Shia LeBeouf as Jimmy Olsen, and most curiously of all, Robert Downey Jr. as Lex Luthor. Just think how different the modern cinema landscape could have been if the man who defined Iron Man and built the Marvel Studios empire had been tied up instead with the Distinguished Competition … Prior to this, however, Time Warner had launched a first attempt to uniting the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader. World’s Finest, named after a classic 1980s team-up graphic novel from Watchmen artist David Gibbons, was set to pit Batman against Superman as early as the year 2000, rumbling along under a variety of names and adapted screenplays until 2005. Wolfgang Petersen was set to helm a take on an Akiva Goldman script (re-written from a draft by Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker), which was darker than even Snyder would dare take this most do-gooding of duos. The synopsis – which, according to legend, saw half the celebrated supporting cast of these heroes already dead and both do-gooders wallowing in despair and beating seven bells out of each other before teaming up to take on Lex Luthor – would surely have been a shocker. Warner were clearly confident about its chances, though; a poster famously appears as an Easter Egg in Will Smith’s take on I am Legend (Smith himself was approached by McG as a potential Superman), and Christian Bale was offered both roles before donning the cape and cowl for Chris Nolan. Josh Hartnett was again linked with the part of Superman – and recently admitted that, with hindsight being 20/20 and equipped with x-ray vision, he deeply regrets his decision to pass and the opportunities it could have provided. One of the most oft-discussed abandoned epics in recent times has been Justice League: Mortal, the first proposed attempt at bringing all if DC’s biggest hitters together on-screen. Attracting attention again now that George Miller has recaptured the imagination of casual moviegoers with the automotive carnage of Mad Max: Fury Road, Mortal is set to undergo the same ‘what if?’ documentary treatment as Superman Lives. Scrapped in 2008, this flick came closer to reaching the screen than many of the movies that will discussed here, with its cast assembled, assigned costumes and shipped out to Australia for filming – but the plug was pulled at the eleventh hour (the WGA strike being among the many factors blamed), and Miller moved onto Happy Feet 2. As you do. The screenplay has leaked all over the internet and can be discovered if you’re into such capers, as has production artwork and storyboards that look suitably mind-blowing (though point to a very significant budget being required). For perhaps the most interesting inside perspective, however, check out this audio interview that Adam Brody, who was set to portray The Flash, conducted with Kevin Smith for his Smodcast network. It’s undeniable that the movie sounds intriguing, and once again, had it beaten Marvel’s own superteam to the screen, who knows what it could have led to? Armie Hammer was name attached to Bruce Wayne in Mortal (another unverified theory as to why the movie was canned claims that Nolan was unhappy about having a different Batman existing alongside his own universe), but this was far from the only Batflick that failed to see the light of day. Call it the Batman & Robin effect; while Joel Schumacher’s camp calamity actually performed respectably at the box office, the poisonous critical reaction left Time Warner running scared of further trips to Gotham City without a major, radical overhaul in approach (though evidently they never considered simply not hiring the aforementioned Akiva Goldsman for scribing duties – how the man responsible for the screenplays to Lost in Space, I, Robot and A Winter’s Tale owns an Academy Award inscribed with his name will trouble me until my dying day).

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