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We lost a legend recently, a director who was influential in many genres. The Buddy Cop (Lethal Weapon), Family Adventure (The Goonies), Fantasy (Ladyhawke), Political Thriller (Conspiracy Theory), Horror (The Omen) but his biggest influence in my eyes was to the Comic Book Movie with 1978's Superman The Movie.

Director-producer Richard Donner, best known for helming the “Lethal Weapon” film series, “The Goonies” and the original “Superman” film, died on Monday. He was 91.

Donner’s production company confirmed news of his death to Variety, though the cause was not disclosed.

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/...u ... 235012025/

With Superman, it was Donner who insisted the subject of the comic book superhero should be treated "straight," giving respect to the genre's particular conventions and tone, rather than the "camp" tone that was planned for the film.

The result is a timeless cinematic classic.

This approach that strongly influenced later genre filmmakers such as Tim Burton (Batman), Bryan Singer (X-Men, that Donner was involved as executive producer), Sam Raimi (Spider-Man trilogy) Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy), Kevin Feige (MCU) and Zack Snyder (DCEU).

Kevin Feige has especially credited the original 78 Superman film as the blueprint the Marvel Cinematic Universe is inspired by.

"Superman: The Movie is still to this day the archetype of the perfect superhero film origin story and we watch it before we make almost any one of our films, and that’s been the case for the past seventeen years since I left the fold to go work for Marvel"

"I always hesitate to come off as the person who is bestowing advice on people. It's not really what I do. What I do know is, they're great characters... They're great characters, they're good comics, they've got great history. I'm not shy about saying, Richard Donner’s Superman I still think is the paradigm by which we all still should follow. It's all there."

Christopher Nolan has also credited the 1978 film for being a influence on his Dark Knight Batman trilogy.

"I want to do for Batman what Dick Donner did for Superman"

"It came to me in a very interesting way, which was my agent, Dan Aloni, called and said, 'It seems unlikely you’d be interested in this, but Warners is sort of casting around for what they would do with Batman.' It had reached the end of its last sort of life, if you’d like. And at the time, nobody used the term reboot — that didn’t exist — so it was really a question of, 'What would you do with this?' I said, 'Well, actually, that is something I’m interested in,' because one of the great films that I am very influenced by that we haven’t talked about was Dick Donner’s Superman — 1978, that came out. It made a huge impression on me. I can remember the trailers for it, I can remember about Superman the movie, all of that. And it was very clear to me that however brilliant – and it was very brilliant – Tim Burton’s take on Batman was in 1989, and it was obviously a worldwide smash, it wasn’t that sort of origin story, it wasn’t that real-world kind of epic movie; it was very Tim Burton, a very idiosyncratic, gothic kind of masterpiece. But it left this interesting gap in pop-culture, which is you know, you had Superman in 1978, but they never did the sort of 1978 Batman, where you see the origin story, where the world is pretty much the world we live in but there’s this extraordinary figure there, which is what worked so well in Dick Donner’s Superman film."

R.I.P Richard Donner.

Thank you for being a part of many people's childhoods and making a generation of audience,

Believe A Man Can Fly.

A Visionary before his time.

BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Thu Jul 08, 2021 3:31 am A Visionary before his time.

Indeed he was.

I hope Debris will do a video on Superman The Movie as a tribute to Donner.