

Despite being able to fly in deep space, Routh's Superman still utilized a Kryptonian space ship to travel to the ruins of Krypton in the five years he was gone from Earth at the start of Superman Returns. Since Routh and Reeve were the same Kryptonian superhero, Routh had all of the powers and did all of the things Reeve did in the first two Superman movies. Bryan Singer's 2006 film Superman Returns was a sequel to Superman II vaguely set "five years later" that ignored Superman III and IV. In Superman IV, Superman was defeated by Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow) in that same film, Superman captured every nuclear missile on Earth, placed them in a giant net in outer space, and hurled the net into the sun.īrandon Routh's Superman was intended to be the same character played by Christopher Reeve. In Superman II, Kal-El met his match with the three Kryptonian villains, General Zod (Terrence Stamp), Ursa (Sarah Douglas), and Non (Jack O'Halloran), who all had the same powers as he did. This made finding worthy opponents for Superman a challenge for the filmmakers. There really were no limits to what Superman could do in Christopher Reeve's films, and that included splitting himself into good and evil versions in Superman III so they could fight for supremacy in a junkyard. In the later Superman films, the Kryptonian manifested ridiculous powers like "Repair the Great Wall of China Vision", but this was likely just a shortcut because of Superman IV: The Quest For Peace's budgetary issues. In the sequels, Superman showed off even more strange abilities, such as being able to make Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) forget he is Clark Kent with a kiss.

Superman's greatest (and most infamous) display of his godlike powers is when he flew around the world and turned back time, which his father Jor-El (Marlon Brando) expressly forbade him to do.
