So here’s a wild one for all you DC fans out there! At one point in 2022, Warner Bros. briefly considered handing Man of Steel 2 to none other than Transformers director Michael Bay, with Henry Cavill’s version of Superman.
This all came to light thanks to a recent report from The Wrap, which revealed, “Before Gunn and Safran’s hiring, Warner Bros. Pictures chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy briefly tried to get a standalone Henry Cavill-led Superman film going in 2022, with Michael Bay eyed to possibly direct, according to two insiders.”
Cavill’s Superman soaring through Bayhem… that would’ve been a bonkers Superman movie. Bay was just one name in the mix. Another filmmaker Warner Bros. considered was Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie, who had previously teamed up with Cavill on Fallout.
McQuarrie even teased what could’ve been an emotionally rich and ambitious take on Superman, saying:
“I will tell you, the first 5 minutes of my Superman movie was… you remember Pixar’s Up? [It was] a sequence with no dialogue that covered that character.
“[It] was a set-up, after which you knew exactly what makes Superman tick and exactly what Superman was most afraid of and why Superman made the choices he made.
“It would have been epic. The scale of the movie would have been absolutely extraordinary. I’ll never tell. I’ll never tell, but boy was it fing good. It was fing good.”
That version clearly had heart. As for Bay’s vision? It’s hard to say. Despite being approached, Bay has consistently shown little interest in joining established superhero franchises. In fact, around the same time this Superman idea was floating around, he told the press:
“It’s not that I’m not interested in Marvel. As Ridley Scott says, the most complicated thing for a director and the most fun thing for a director is to build the world.
“I’m not the guy to go into Lucas’ Star Wars and do Star Wars Five. That’s not me. I’m not the one to come into Iron Man Seven. I’m not the one to do Batman 10.
“I want to do my own thing. I would love to do a superhero thing but I want to do it on my own terms and create my own world.”
Still, it’s interesting to imagine what Bay’s take on Superman, would’ve been had he accepted the opportunity to take it on.
In the end, the DCEU, as we knew it, collapsed under the weight of its own craziness, and James Gunn’s fresh start is now on the horizon with Superman set to launch a new chapter.
But, for a fleeting moment, there was a timeline where Cavill returned, and Michael Bay brought him back in a blaze of exploding barns, wild flying chase sequences, and American flags fluttering in slow motion in the middle of massive Superman battle.
