Back when Man of Steel came out, some fans insisted that they saw Christopher Reeve briefly "appear" in a key scene late in the film. Now, the film's director Zack Snyder has definitively said that's not the case.

A video posted to the Cines Argentinos YouTube page shows Snyder being interviewed, and asked about the scene -- which purportedly takes place during Superman's attack on the World Engine over the Indian Ocean.

"Fan theory. It doesn't exist; it's just looks like that," Snyder said, then added, "If it looks like that, that's the gods, not me."

When Superman is about to destroy the World Engine, in a scene that's a pretty clear homage to the old Fleischer cartoons, there's what appears to be a distortion to his face. Many fans thought Cavill's face was briefly, digitally replaced by Reeve's in an homage to the actor who defined Superman for a generation of moviegoers.

Our inclination was to say that wasn't the case, but there's no solid evidence one way or another. Watching closely and in high-def, it seems as though Cavill's face just looks more like Reeve's when he's in that sequence, with special effects and probably high-powered fans blowing on his face. What seemed in the theater like a half-second is actually a longer period of time during which there's not one particular shot where he looks more like Reeve than others to us, so it seems unlikely to have been digital manipulation.

We had previously checked with the video commentary track that runs alongside the movie on the Bonus Disc included with the Blu-ray, out tomorrow. And the commentary was silent on the matter. Snyder had declined previous opportunities to comment on it when asked up to that point, so it seemed as though he wasn't interested in giving a definitive answer -- which of course convinced fans that they were right and the filmmaker was being coy.