Bryan Singer announced at Comic Con that he's to direct a sequel to Superman Returns, slated to arrive in 2009, and color me shocked. Given the huge cost of Returns (upwards of $200 million plus marketing costs) and its lackluster b.o. take ($170,967,498 domestically according to boxofficemojo.com, 3 weeks after release, I don't know if it will hit $200m), I seriously didn't think a sequel was in the offing. If he's announcing it at Comic Con, then he has to be at least 60% sure that the movie will get made; it does not pay to mislead your hardcore, and vocal! fanbase. But I doubt that this movie is absolutely green-lit and go: SR's underperformance makes me doubt the studio is absolutely 100% behind the sequel.

Though -- a sequel which I sorely want. I don't think SR is a great movie, or even perhaps a purely good movie, but it has these intriguing elements in it that make me want to see more of the universe. I think Singer has it in him to do something very interesting with a second movie, something looser and more playful, with more humor and less of a solemn, lugubrious tone. Like how X2 improved upon the first movie.

Watching SR for the second time, I realized that my problem with the movie is that though it's faithful in tone and action, it doesn't really work as a dramatic narrative. There's an odd lack of urgency to the movie, possibly because of how passive Routh's Clark is. Nothing seems to be driving the movie forward dramatically -- nothing seems to matter, and that's something that the X-Men movies he directed also had issue with, a strange sense of aimlessness. Watching the movie a second time felt a lot like watching the waves crash into the shore at sunset: hypnotically lovely but with no meaning behind the motions. If only he could shake off the overly respectful tone of the Richard Donner Superman movies, he might be able to do something interesting and electrically alive in his next movie while still keeping his lyrical visuals.