A Man Of Steel Deleted Scene Would Have Given Us An Emotional Superman Kill
Of all the movies to emerge from the Snyderverse (aka the DCEU), "Man of Steel" might be the most palatable. It's true that Henry Cavill was a great Superman who never got a great Superman movie, but 2013's "Man of Steel" did at least represent Snyder's efforts to try something new with the titular hero. While it was slightly muddled in its attempts to meld more fantastical elements with the gritty realism of a Christopher Nolan Batman movie — the esteemed director served as producer on "Man of Steel" — the film that kicked off the DCEU was arguably the strongest entry in the entire ill-fated enterprise.
Unfortunately, a muddled tone and somewhat forgettable story weren't the film's only issues. Many fans of Supes took issue with the end of "Man of Steel," in which Cavill's Kal-El kills the film's villain, Michael Shannon's General Zod — recently resurrected for the box office disaster that was "The Flash." Snyder made no apology for having his Superman commit murder at the end of his film. After all, in a grounded story, how else was the hero supposed to deal with an antagonist that had just leveled Metropolis? Did it matter that the grounded aspect had already been somewhat undermined by the fact that this antagonist was an all-powerful alien with a giant floating terraforming machine at his disposal? Evidently, it did not.
Predictably, the killing scene proved controversial. But it turns out that wasn't the only consequential death that was supposed to be in the film. In fact, there were initial plans to include a scene which may have made the eventual Zod murder perhaps slightly easier to stomach.
'It's a powerful thing to take a life'
When Richard Donner made his seminal "Superman" in 1978, he made sure to treat the source material with as much reverence as was humanly possible. That was basically the director's guiding principle, with Donner telling Den of Geek in 2018 that he set out to "make a good movie about this beloved character and treat him with our greatest respect."
Zack Snyder, unlike Bryan Singer with his 2006 effort "Superman Returns," had no intention of repeating Donner's movies. In fact, both he and writer David S. Goyer, who previously penned Christopher Nolan's 2005 origin story "Batman Begins," wanted to delve into the darker side of the Man of Steel. And they certainly managed that. In "Man of Steel," Superman is not only forced to kill Zod, he ends his invasion of Earth by snapping the villain's neck in a pretty intense scene that immediately divided fans. No wonder Donner wasn't a fan of the DCEU's version of Superman.
But there were originally plans for a scene that would have foreshadowed and given important context to Kal-El's later brutality. Speaking to Movie Web, Goyer explained how he'd written a scene involving Kevin Costner's Jonathan Kent showing his adopted son, Clark, what it means to take a life:
"Ironically there was a scene we wrote that didn't get filmed in which Jonathan takes young Clark hunting and they kill a deer, and young Clark is just gutted by the act and Jonathan says, 'It's a powerful thing to take a life, even if you're forced to take a life'. That was a scene that didn't make it into the final movie, we never filmed it."
Does it matter?
Would including the scene that Goyer mentioned have improved "Man of Steel?" Maybe. It would at least give a potential impetus for Superman's eventual killing, perhaps giving fans who were perplexed by Zod's death some way of making sense of it all. But for those fans that maintain Superman just shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence as murder, it likely would have made no difference, and may have even upset them more by showing Johnathan Kent justifying killing.
Comic book legend Grant Morrison summed up the general feeling that the Zod kill was a step too far, telling USA Today:
"I don't know about you, but the last moral decision I made didn't have anything to do with killing people. There is a certain demand for it, but I just keep wondering why people insist that this is the sort of thing we'd all do if we were in Superman's place and had to make the tough decision and we'd kill Zod. Would we? Very few of us have ever killed anything."
With that in mind, it seems very unlikely that a scene with Johnathan Kent talking about how "it's a powerful thing to take a life" would have made much difference to how so many fans felt about the film. Even Christopher Nolan initially tried to change the ending of "Man of Steel" before being convinced by Goyer's final script.
We'll have to wait to see what direction James Gunn takes with "Superman: Legacy," which is currently set for a 2025 debut. Hopefully, the director reintroduces some of the reverence for the character that Richard Donner held in such high regard. Or, at least doesn't have Supes snapping necks and being forced to watch wildlife perish.