The “Superman Returns” Principle

Just because a lot of time and resources have gone into something, doesn’t mean it will benefit the final product.

Superman Returns is famous for having one of the most expensive deleted scenes ever filmed. It’s estimated to have cost over $10m, and was a 6 minute opening to the film with no dialogue.

While there was obviously a creative vision behind it, the filmmakers realised when they saw the finished film that the movie would be better without it.

They understood that just because a lot of time and resources have gone into something, doesn’t mean that it will benefit the final product.

This is a principle that many people simply won’t understand, or will need a lot of convincing to see. As filmmakers, it’s our job to make those tough calls that no one else wants to, in order to benefit the story.

When creating almost any documentary, you will spend a lot of time, work, and resources on scenes that ultimately need to be cut. An additonal challenge in the case of BTS documentaries is that the people you’re filming will invest a lot of time and effort into things that you simply won’t have time to focus on unless you want to make a 10-hour documentary that gives significant time and attention to every single crew member.

The key question you need to ask for this principle is “What will make the final product the best it can possibly be?” This question leaves very little room for how much time and money has been spent on any given scene. You may have shot interviews that just aren’t quite interesting or relevant enough for the main story, or you may have spent a month editing a scene that ultimately affects the pacing in a negative way.

It can be helpful to look at objective measures like money. For the financiers of Superman Returns, their goal is to make the best return on investment possible. Their best chance of doing so, is to make the most engaging film they can. If you realise that the $10m opening scene is going to bore audiences and make them less likely to recommend the movie to their friends, the answer is quite simple - it needs to go! You will actually make more money by cutting the scene out, regardless of how much you previously spent on it. At least you can learn a valuable lesson about what not to spend resources on next time.

Now this idea is quite general, but I see BTS documentaries as an area where it gets overlooked more regularly. Ultimately, the key creatives need to decide what the goal of a BTS documentary will be. It could be anywhere between creating something for superfans that will give them a deep dive into how their favourite film was made, through to making a documentary for general audiences that gives an overview of what goes into making a movie. Once a goal has been decided on, that should be the guiding star for what gets included in the runtime.

Without a key goal set, it is very easy to start catering to the desires of crew members, actors, and producers, who all have their own priorities for what they would like attention to be given to.

You may be persuaded to spend time on a scene because the set cost a lot of money and the producer wants to get as much mileage out of the expense as possible. Or you may feel the pressure to include as much as possible from an actor’s interview because their time is so valuable. One example from my own work is a desire from the producer to show a lot of the pre-production because months of hard work had gone into constructing the sets.

In any of these situations, it’s important for us to keep the needs of the audience at the front of our mind, even if it seems a shame to cut something out.

Two contrasting examples I would look at are The Hobbit Appendices compared to the “Cameras in Middle Earth” featurettes from The Lord of the Rings Appendices.

The Lord of the Rings is much more concise and entertaining, and you can tell that the editors chose to favour pacing and entertainment value over including everything they had to work with. Where The Hobbit feels like way too many things were left in which may have been fun to experience on set, but don’t necessarily translate as well to the viewer (in my opinion).

It’s a hard skill to learn, but is one of the key things that makes a great editor. For more on this, I would recommend listening to my interview with “The Director and the Jedi” editors, Garret Price and Avner Shiloah.