“I am 67, I am an old broad now! … I don’t have a career I need to worry about protecting. My life has nothing to do with movies anymore. I live in a little town in Montana and basically do political activism,” Margot Kidder, aka Lois Lane in the Christopher Reeve Superman films, told HeyUGuys. It was part of an answer about whether or not she’d appear in another DC related project (essentially, if the script was good, she’d do it), after popping up in a couple episodes of “Smallville,” but it might also explain her blunt opinion about the new era of Man of Steel movies.
Essentially, Kidder is not a fan of what Zack Snyder and co. have done with Clark Kent, and it starts with her own former character Lois Lane, one she laments no longer has any agency.
“They took one of the best American actresses’ around, Amy Adams, and didn’t give her anything to do! I mean, how stupid is that?” Kidder said. “They made her what used to be the girlfriend, which kind of ended in the 60s with women’s rights.”
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Overall, the actress is hardly impressed with how Superman is currently portrayed, especially compared to the films she was in, blaming it on studios trying to capture a certain audience.
“Superman responds to women by saving them, saves the children and beats up the bad guys, if you will,” she explained. “In that sense, it’s so much simpler than the later films made it out to be. I think there was a cynical decision on the part of the studios, which are now owned by multi-national conglomerates just like everything else on the planet. So they would make these artistic decisions by non-artists — guys would want to hit the millennial demographic because they literally make up about one quarter of the population.”
“Probably, my guess is what happened is when they decided to hit the demographic of the millennials in the later films. I think the directors were good, the actors were good but the basic approach wasn’t there,” Kidder added.
And certainly, looking across “Man Of Steel” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” if you just single out the cast alone — Ben Affleck, Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Shannon, Amy Adams, Henry Cavill, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons — it’s a bit mind-boggling that both movies, especially the latter, have become so contentious. They should really be slam dunk efforts.
However, maybe Kidder is living in the past. Perhaps the flawed, pariah Superman that Snyder created is exactly the character to reflect the current times. Thoughts? Let us know below. [AV Club]