Super Duper Man (Super Man 4 The Quest For Piece)

Welcome back to the WHY ? Us Channel. Your home for obscure cult movies and the classics. Today we will go over a movie so bad that it almost killed superhero movies for good. That movie is SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE. A movie so terrible, not only did it ruin the careers of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder and others involved, it helped bring down Cannon Group as a filmmaking company.

SUPERMAN 4 was so bad that there wasn’t another SUPERMAN movie until SUPERMAN RETURNS in 2006. There was an attempt in 90’s by Tim Burton and Kevin Smith to bring back the superhero starring Nicolas Cage but that failed.

We have gone over before how crappy Cannon Group was. They were competing with Orion Pictures and other minor companies with low to mid budget movies but generally their output was often marred with horrible production values and questionable ethics. SUPERMAN IV was Cannon’s last major attempt to break into the mainstream Hollywood level as by this time their previous box office bombs such MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE and OVER THE TOP to name some came and went, they drained the company’s finances in terms of budget and poor box office returns. SUPERMAN IV by the time it was ready to shoot, the budget was slashed in half to around $17 million. Cannon would resort to their classic techniques of poor filmmaking to make up for the difference.

The movie had to reuse special effects whenever possible. In fact the same shot of Superman flying straight at the camera was used multiple times. The reduced budget also meant the special effects budget was dramatically cut down. It wasn’t uncommon in the 80’s for sfx movies to have their budgets reduced but SUPERMAN was not the movie to pull that stunt on. The terrible sfx in the movie was so bad that in some scenes you can see the backstage area not edited out in the fight scenes in space between Superman and Nuclear Man. The classic flying sequence in the first movie is put to shame with the one in this movie.

To demonstrate how far the budget was cut in the movie, the opening title sequence with the credits is pale in comparison to the first movie as though it was done half ass. Another reason why this movie is not remembered so fondly is the main villain Nuclear Man. A Chip N Dales dancer with no acting experience, Mark Pillow struggled to make his character feel and sound convincing and the poor writing and sfx help make the character even more cheesy.

The icing on the cake was the incredible poor writing for this movie. The plot felt forced at times and was all over the place. The Characters you came to love from the previous movies and shells of their former selves and the anti-nuclear weapons sentiment was just Christopher Reeve’s inflated opinion allowed to pass as character development. It feels forced because Reeve wanted it in the movie or else he wouldn’t do it. He also donned the red cape one last time in exchange that Cannon produced a passion project called STREET SMART. Reeve constantly fought with the producers of Cannon when their money issues threatened to derail STREET SMART.
Both movies would fail at the box office, eventually helping to doom CANNON GROUP. CHristopher Reeve would never headline a major Hollywood movie again after the flop of SUPERMAN 4. Surprisingly STREET SMART would earn Morgan Freeman his first acting Oscar nomination but every movie Reeve did afterwards was either a supporting role in better movies like REMAINS OF THE DAY or the lead in movie of the week type fares to continue paying his bills.