As if remakes of adaptations of comic books weren’t bad enough, Hollywood’s now getting into the business of reboots of remakes of adaptations of comic books. Per today’s rich old evil person periodical The Wall Street Journal, Warner’s Jeff Robinov (sounds like “rub one off”) confirms that a new Superman movie is in the works, one that disregards the disappointing 2006 film like Jason Bonham disregards timekeeping:

‘Superman’ didn’t quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to,” says Mr. Robinov. “It didn’t position the character the way he needed to be positioned. Had ‘Superman’ worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009. But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all.”

Robinov went on to say, in a French accent for no apparent reason:

“[with regard to DC comic properties] We’re going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it. That goes for the company’s Superman franchise as well.”

In other words, they’re going take a Dark Knight-esque “brooding” approach, because if it worked for that film, surely it’ll work for a Superman film as well, right? Right?

This is what’s known in the industry as “stupidity.” A dark tone works for Batman because he’s a dark character. Every film ever made about the batty one (with the exception of the awesome Adam West flick) took on the character’s inherent duplicity and self-loathing. Hell, just look at his costume. All black and leather and a cape and demonic looking pointy ears. He’s the Glen Danzig of superheroes.

But that’s just not what Superman’s about. Superman’s one of the good guys. He’s the all-American, chiseled-jawed clinch quarterback for the free world. He’s Tom effing Brady, man. Tom mothereffin’ gonna win the Superbowl in 2009 Brady. Yet now Warner Brahs want to put black eye-liner on him, give him one of those emo-shwoop haircuts and make him write bad poetry about “the hurt” on his MySpace blog? Yeah, instead of doing that, why don’t you just mail me a check in the amount of the money you’re going to lose and we can pretend your half-baked, 20/20 hind-sighted, bandwagon-jumping scheme actually worked. It didn’t work when Bryan Singer tried to make him a homo, so what makes you think turning Superman into a Hot Topic Goth loser is going to fare any better?

Times like this make me wish the Kevin Smith Superman had actually happened. I mean it would’ve been awful, but awesomely awful, like when my grandma fell down and broke her hip trying to chase those black kids off her lawn. Oh, that crazy grandma! She’s dead now.

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