Superman’s costume is bright red, blue and yellow, not that you’d know it from watching Man of Steel. The most recent live-action Superman movie drained the colors right out of the superhero’s origin story in an apparent effort to look more like The Dark Knight, and the results were met with mixed feelings. But what if Man of Steel was in color?
That’s the question raised by Video Lab in this new video, which color corrects footage from Man of Steel in an effort to recapture what was actually caught on film. We know from set pictures that Superman’s costume in Zack Snyder’s movie is way more colorful than what we saw in Man of Steel, and we know just from walking outside that the sky is actually blue. And if you look at Man of Steel with those colors in place, the effect is eye-popping.
Related: Watch CraveOnline’s 10-Episode Superman Retrospective ‘Cinema of Steel’ (Video)
Man of Steel is a handsome production no matter how you slice it, and while some of us like the movie more than others, there’s little denying that the efforts to make Superman look and feel contemporary sapped one of the hero’s greatest strengths: his ability to look and feel timeless. We here at CraveOnline watched the above video and started wishing we could see Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel again, in its entirety, in bright and encouraging color. Maybe we’d see things in the film we had never seen before: like a sense of genuine optimism.
Colors matter in a motion picture, but trends in color timing change. Watch Martin Scorsese’s excellent Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator sometime. In that film, Scorsese filmed each sequence in Hughes’ life as it would have been filmed using the color-timing of the era. Drained colors for the silent era, surreal greens as Technicolor took hold. It’s a striking and effective crash course in the effect color can have on a story, and how it evolves over time.
For now, it looks like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will have the same look and feel as Man of Steel, for better or worse. But trends change. It’s only a matter of time before Superman starts to look like Superman again.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
