I forgot how bad these final 2 Christopher Reeve Superman movies were

After watching and rewatching To James Gunn Superman trailer I’ve been on Superman for the past few weeks. To proceed, I decided that while building Legos over the Christmas breakI would watch them all again Christopher Reeve Superman movies. Movies I had seen before—I’m even old enough to have seen them IV in theaters but haven’t been rewatched in decades. What I found was one of the fastest declining franchises I can think of, although I believe history turned two of the movies around.

Everyone would agree that Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman is a classic. It is so epic and filled with memorable scenes that it still stands as one of the greatest superhero movies of all time. It’s clearly the best of the bunch. Superman II is a step down for sure, but it wraps up the story of this movie nicely, bringing us full circle with Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s characters and ending the whole thing with General Zod.

Then I got involved Superman III and I immediately knew it was a bad decision. It begins with Richard Pryor’s character at the unemployment office. Then, magically, he becomes the world’s greatest computer hacker. Clark Kent returns to Smallville and becomes strangely close to an old classmate. Pryor and his evil boss make fake kryptonite that is actually a cigarette and inexplicably turns Superman into an ass. Then we have to watch him be an ass for far too long. In the end, Superman fights himself, becomes normal again, and fights the computer hackers while inexplicably forgiving Pryor’s character. This is, to put it bluntly, utter nonsense.

Superman III it actually pissed me off. If I wanted to watch a Richard Pryor movie, I would. This was apparently just Richard Pryor playing in the Superman film, not the other way around. It doesn’t understand the characters, never develops a dramatic plot, is filled with all sorts of irrelevant nonsense, and works better as an anti-smoking ad than anything else. This worried me a lot because as long as I had seen Superman and Superman II several times in recent years, I didn’t remember III or IV as well. All I remembered was thinking, IV was the worst of the bunch. So when I started it I was more than a little hesitant.

Going in with these low expectations, I actually found Superman IV: The Quest for Peace to be significantly better than Superman III. It’s still terrible – let’s not forget that – but at least it’s trying to be Superman movie. He is in love with Lois Lane again, with Margot Kidder again for the whole movie. Lex Luthor has a new scheme, and Gene Hackman returns for the entire film. Superman must fight a supervillain from another world in Nuclear Man. And the hero works for the betterment of the whole world. These are all things that feel crucial, in one way or another, to the DNA of a Superman movie.

Of course, this all happens too easily, and none of the actors – except for the always outstanding Reeve – care one iota about what they’re doing. Superman IV it forgets the events of other movies, looks bad, feels somehow too small for the franchise, and the action parts are terrible. This is a bad, bad movie. But this is a step up from the abomination of the previous one.

When the movie ends (Superman IV it’s also about 45 minutes shorter than the previous three, thankfully though there are many reasons for this), I felt pretty confident about my ranking. One is one, two is two, four is three and three is four. To be honest, it seemed like an almost foolproof list. So when I looked at Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes to see this Superman III is considered better—though not by much—than IVI was a bit surprised. Obviously that’s the narrative I had in my head, but watching the two bad movies back-to-back, after the great first and the good second, I felt the story was wrong. Superman III is horrible in every sense of the word while The search for peace is terrible while at least trying to be a Superman movie. And that put him over the top.

Fortunately, Warner Bros. has the perfect palate cleanser for these two atrocities. No, it’s not the unofficial sequel Superman is back since 2006 We mean Super/Human: The Christopher Reeve Story, a fantastic documentary about the man and the hero. this it might actually be the best Superman movie ever.

All these movies are currently streaming on Max.

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