Do you remember sitting in a darkened theater in December 1978, watching a man in a blue cape lift off the screen and actually fly? Not with wires you could almost see. Not with cartoonish effects. He just flew. And for a moment, you believed every second of it.
That moment has never really left us. And now, nearly half a century later, Esquire has made it official. In a recent feature ranking the 30 greatest superhero movies of all time, the 1978 Superman came in at number one.
The magazine called it simply: the big bang of superhero cinema.
A Cast Worth Remembering
Christopher Reeve was chosen for the role after more than 200 actors auditioned. Looking back, it is hard to imagine anyone else in that cape.
What Reeve pulled off was genuinely difficult. He had to play two completely different people: the quiet, awkward Clark Kent bumbling around the Daily Planet, and the confident, heroic Superman soaring above Metropolis. He made both feel real, and he made them feel like the same man.
Around him, the cast was something special. Margot Kidder played Lois Lane. Gene Hackman brought a gleefully villainous energy to Lex Luthor. Marlon Brando appeared as Jor-El, Superman’s father on the doomed planet Krypton. Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter played Jonathan and Martha Kent, the Kansas couple who raised the boy from the stars. Jackie Cooper, Ned Beatty, Valerie Perrine, and Terence Stamp rounded out a cast that read like a Hollywood Who’s Who.
A Film That Changed Everything
The story itself is one most of us knew by heart even before the movie opened. Baby Kal-El escapes the destruction of Krypton, lands in Smallville, grows up as Clark Kent, and eventually finds his way to Metropolis and to his destiny.
But what the film did that no superhero movie had done before was make it all feel real. That was largely thanks to the technical craftsmanship behind the camera. John Williams wrote the soaring musical score. The special effects team worked hard to put a convincing flying man on screen. The Academy Awards took notice; the film earned nominations for Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound, and it won a Special Achievement Academy Award for Visual Effects. It also took home the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film.
Audiences loved it. The film was made on a reported $55 million budget and earned $300 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing release of 1978. Today, Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 87% Tomatometer score from 123 reviews and an 86% audience score from more than 250,000 ratings. Time has been very kind to this one.
In 2017, Superman was added to the National Film Registry, cementing its place in American film history. Three sequels followed between 1980 and 1987.
The Man Behind the Cape
Christopher Reeve went on to work in film, television, and theater after the Superman films. Then in 1995, a horse-riding accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. He became a tireless advocate for spinal cord injury research and disability rights until his death in 2004 at age 52.
His Superman performance outlasted everything. It still does.
If you have not seen it in a while, this might be the weekend to pull it back up. Some movies age. This one just keeps getting better.
