While DC Comics and Warner Bros. have moved on with their big screen interpretation of the Man of Steel, there are pockets of fans who are still complaining about the first time the character got rebooted: Bryan Singer’s 2006 film Superman Returns. While the movie received largely positive reviews and made nearly $400 million at the global box office, there are still many who continue to complain about the fact that the titular hero never throws a punch or Lex Luthor’s underwhelming evil plot. Still, though, even after nearly a decade no fan has actually ever tried to confront star Brandon Routh about it face-to-face.
Phoning in as a guest on The DJ Tanner Show to promote his appearance in the upcoming third season of Arrow, Routh revealed during the interview that he has yet to find anyone who will actually complain about Superman Returns to his face. Asked by the hosts how he deals with negative responses from some of the more rabid Superman fans, the actor bluntly explained that "nobody has had the balls" to actually rage about the movie in his presence.
But don’t take that to mean that Routh has never actually heard any critiques about his performance in Superman Returns. As he explained on the show,
" If they have those feelings or misgivings they vent them on the internet, which I have definitely read over the years. I don’t shy away from that. I like to hear what people really think. And there’s truth to everything that people say negatively. They have their own opinions about what they wanted to see."
Going further, he added that there’s simply no way that they can appease absolutely everybody, but that he knows that "there’s an overwhelming number of people who enjoyed the film," and that’s who he made the movie for.
In the years since Superman Returns we’ve seen Brandon Routh replaced by Henry Cavill as the new silver screen Man of Tomorrow, but Routh is hardly done playing superhero characters – even those within the DC canon. In the upcoming season of Arrow he will be playing Ray Palmer, perhaps better known as the shrinking costumed vigilante The Atom. The character is expected to play a fairly large role in multiple episodes of the show and will be both a business competitor for Oliver Queen and a possible love interest for Oliver’s close ally, Felicity Smoak. We first got a glimpse at him in the trailer that was unveiled this summer during San Diego Comic-Con.
Arrow Season 3 will be airing its first episode on The CW on October 8th.
