‘Superman II’: The Other Director’s Cut
Time Warner plans to issue a director’s cut of Superman II on Nov. 20 that will feature the work of director Richard Donner, who was fired from the movie and replaced by Richard Lester midway through the movie in 1979.
According to Wednesday’s London Times, the film will include 15 minutes of previously unseen footage of Marlon Brando as Superman’s father, Jor-El.
The film also employs footage from Donner’s screen tests and numerous alternate sequences. In fact, according to the Times, the film uses less than 20 percent of the footage shot by Lester.
A spokeswoman for Warner Home Video told the newspaper that the new film was made possible because producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who fired Donner, sold their interest in the film to Time Warner.
A critic for Britain’s Empire magazine who viewed the new version said that it was plagued with continuity problems arising from the fact that Donner was forced to make do with footage on hand, including the screen-test footage.
“It’s patchy (Reeve’s hairstyle changes from shot to shot), badly lit and stagy, but watching Reeve’s performance is electrifying,” according to the Empire review.
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