On July 24th of 2017 SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE will turn 30 years old.

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE began with good intentions. It had a decent script that dealt with the Man of Steel going up against the nuclear arms race and Lex Luthor trying to once again destroy Superman and also keep the threat of nuclear war alive with his creation Nuclear Man who is cloned from a strand of Superman’s hair.

It was meant to be a Superman sequel with the same brilliance and simplicity of DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL with the same message of world peace.

Christopher Reeve was returning as Superman/Clark Kent and as co-story writer, co-producer and even later directing a 2nd Unit action sequence. Reeve himself had convinced Margot Kidder to return as Lois Lane and Gene Hackman to return as Lex Luthor.

On paper this sounds like it could have been the best sequel since Superman II!

SUPERMAN III had been mostly a camp fest starring Richard Pryor. And this was not at all Pryor’s fault. It was Warner and the Salkinds who more or less wanted to make a Richard Pryor movie co-starring Superman. Pryor had wanted to be in a Superman movie. He had even expressed a love for SUPERMAN II publicly on the Tonight Show. The producers and director Richard Lester left room for Pryor to improvise if he wanted to but Pryor didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself so he usually stuck to the script. Nevertheless SUPERMAN III was still a hit earning over $100,000,000.00 both domestic and worldwide combined at the box office. It still held it’s own in a Summer with RETURN OF THE JEDI and two James Bond movies. It had earned back it’s $39,000,000.00 budget but was not as successful as the last two had been.

The Salkinds then made SUPERGIRL which opened in the fall of 1984 to lackluster reviews and even less than stellar box office.

CANNON FILMS was a big international studio that was run like a low budget studio. Big in the sense that they somehow always managed to secure millions upon millions of dollars to finance a multitude of movies in one year all over the globe. At the time while SUPERMAN IV was going into production somewhere between 20 & 30 Cannon productions were shooting all at once around the world in places where it was cheap to shoot. Cannon was known for cutting big name stars and big name directors big checks (Stallone $12,000,000 to star in OVER THE TOP (1987). Yet they still ran like a cheap operation. They were bad about paying bills and even worse about paying most of the crews on every one of these productions that were shooting at the same time all over the globe. Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus ran Cannon films and had bought the movie rights for Superman from Alexander and Ilya Salkind right after SUPERMAN III.

Menahem Golan had liked the script for STREET SMART and agreed to make the movie with Christopher Reeve. Apart of the deal was for Reeve to star in SUPERMAN IV. As a another way of attracting Reeve he gave him script control and let him produce on both movies.

Christopher Reeve cared very much about both movies. And when it came to SUPERMAN IV he wanted to get it right. He had not been very happy about the way SUPERMAN III had turned out. Not that his experience working with Pryor hadn’t been fun. But he felt the movie itself had missed the mark.

Reeve must have had an uneasy feeling about the future after having phoned Menahem Golan one midnight demanding that the production of STREET SMART be given an additional one and a half million dollars. Reeve had then said to Golan, “If you don’t have the one and a half million for this movie. Then how do I know you have the thirty-five million for Superman?!”

In August of 1986 production began in England with a budget of $15,000,000

A good chunk of filming was chosen to be done at Milton Keynes a newly built industrial park in the suburbs outside of London. The director of the film Sydney J. Furie had begged Menahem Golan to shoot in New York. But Golan refused to shoot any production in New York citing the high cost. The only problem was it didn’t look anything like New York or Metropolis for that matter. Even locals would have laughed if you told them Milton Keynes was doubling for New York City or Metropolis. The other problem was that a large section of it was going to double for the U.N. building.

The photo below from Den of Geek below makes a perfect comparison of New York to Milton Keynes.

Other parts of the film including major interior and exteriors were shot at Elstree Studios now owned by Cannon.

In fact with the exception of a few background plates almost every part of SUPERMAN IV would be filmed almost entirely in England. This was minor compared to the first three Superman movies which had multiple locations across the globe besides including England.

Because the budget was now reduced every department would suffer on some level. The budget was now less than half of what Superman III had cost. And even far far less than SUPERMAN THE MOVIE & SUPERMAN II had cost. (Superman The Movie & Superman II were filmed back to back with additional re-writes and re-shoots on Superman II directed by Richard Lester. Superman The Movie cost $54,000,000 while Superman II cost $55,000,000.) Even in 1986 dollars.$15,000,000 was cheap especially for a Superman movie.

On the first three Superman movies Front Projection effects were quite common for flying effects. It was an effect that involved the camera, a projector and a screen that reflected light back into the camera. The set-up took awhile and it also involved actors on wires which took more time. But the effect came out seamless on film and a lot of times and sometimes more effective than blue-screen or optical effects.

Optical Effects were used fairly commonly in the pre-CG days. It was a complex process where multiple projectors were aligned with one camera. But the process was not always effective and could be very painstaking and take multiple passes with the camera and the lab sometimes just to get even a 30 second shot. It required a lot of time and patience to get it right. And in the case of SUPERMAN IV many effects shots suffered from lack of time and money given to Harrison Ellenshaw and his talented crew. And because of this many shots in the film look unfinished and since many flying shots were not completed one will see a few flying shots that are reused in the movie.

SUPERMAN IV:The Quest For Peace would open on Friday, July 24, 1987 with surprisingly very little fanfare. Despite lots of tv ads and Margot Kidder appearing on Late Night with David Letterman to promote it. And a premiere in London with the Royal Family attending and actor Mark Pillow dressed as his character in the movie Nuclear Man attending as well.

Compared to the first three movies there was not a lot of big hype or excitement surrounding it’s release in the Summer of 1987. It’s failure might not have only been it’s lack of budget. SUPERMAN IV might have also been over-shadowed by other movies that Summer.

Orion Pictures the same company that gave us THE TERMINATOR back in 1984 would release a $13,000,000 clever, little, action film called ROBOCOP which had opened a week before and by the time SUPERMAN IV had opened ROBOCOP had already made $6,332,716. By September of 1987 it would go on to make $53,000,000 domestically . Movies like BEVERLY HILLS COP II, PREDATOR, THE UNTOUCHABLES, DRAGNET, ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, THE LOST BOYS and the new James Bond movie starring the new James Bond Timothy Dalton in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, JAWS THE REVENGE (the 4TH JAWS movie)and later DIRTY DANCING all over-shadowed SUPERMAN IV THE QUEST FOR PEACE in the Summer of 1987. And sadly the failure of SUPERMAN IV THE QUEST FOR PEACE further sent the Cannon Group into bankruptcy.

-214scifi



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