J.J. Abrams is already the king of the geeks, helming both Paramount's Star Trek franchise as well as the upcoming Disney Star Wars sequel. A leaked treatment for a film codenamed "Superman Flyby" emerged earlier this year though, and revealed that he was also preparing to get his hands on the superhero genre.
Abrams recently spoke to Empire about the cancelled Flyby project, explaining his own take on the Superman mythos:
"The thing that I tried to emphasise in the story was that if the Kents found this boy, Kal-El, who had the power that he did, he would have most likely killed them both in short order, and the idea that these parents would see - if they were lucky to survive long enough - that they had to immediately begin teaching this kid to limit himself and to not be so fast, not be so strong, not be so powerful," said Abrams.
"The result of that, psychologically, would be fear of oneself, self-doubt and being ashamed of what you were capable of," he continued. "Extrapolating that to adulthood became a fascinating psychological profile of someone who was not pretending to be Clark Kent, but who was Clark Kent. Who had become that kind of a character who is not able or willing to accept who he was and what his destiny was."
"The idea in the movie was that he became Superman because he realised he had to finally own his strength and what he'd always been," Abrams added. "I don't know if that's what Zack and Chris [Nolan] are doing, but it looks like that's part of the idea and I could not be more thrilled to see that movie. That to me was always the way to go," he concluded.
The full interview will be available in the upcoming May 2013 issue of Empire Magazine. Until then, we can only wonder what Abrams vision for Superman might have looked like.
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