“Superman vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors, and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon” is as compelling as that full title sounds, as Superman is a property that has been around since 1938, and make no mistake, this book goes to great lengths to show that Superman has often been handled as just that very thing – property.

Starting with his modest roots in the comic books of the late 1930s, this is a thorough accounting of all the projects that this character inspired, from radio to television to film and back again, and more interesting than the actual projects made are all the different projects that almost got made but never happened; much money was spent on Tim Burton’s 1990s take on Superman, with Nic Cage signed on to wear the tights and cape, but that plug got pulled after much craziness, much like the Kevin Smith commissioned Superman script and the J.J. Abrams’ script that got killed by a scathing review on the geek-centric website Ain’t It Cool News and scared off executives from committing to his weird version of this very well known story.

There’s even the Lois Lane television series that got a little bit of traction before going nowhere, and in introducing the roots of the successful television series “Smallville,” there is a lot of time spent on a never produced pilot for a proposed show called “Bruce Wayne,” which would have been a series about the character of Bruce Wayne in the years leading up to his becoming Batman. As the pilot script called for a cameo from a young Clark Kent, someone took that idea and turned it into “Smallville.” Cray.Continue Reading …