Geoff Johns and Kevin Feige Honor Richard Donner
In life, we all have inspirations, whether it be a story we’ve read, a show/movie we’ve watch, or a person who just inspired you to greatness or to do a certain things, we all need inspiration for something. For the superhero genre, many consider Richard Donner’s Superman as the inspiration for every film that came after, one way or another. Two men who were deeply inspired by Donner and his Superman film are Geoff Johns and Kevin Feige, who are two of the most powerful men in comics today.
At the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, both Feige and Johns came up to the stage in a sign of unity and respect to talk about what Donner did for them and their careers. Oh which he both supported for the record.
“[I]n particular, Superman: The Movie is still, to this day, the archetype of the perfect superhero film origin story,” Feige said, “and we watch it before me make almost any one of our films and that’s been the case for the past 17 years since I left the fold to go work for Marvel.”
https://youtu.be/PrNwMXcKxWE
For Johns, he was Donner’s assistant on the film, and he remembered what happened when Donner first got the script for the film:
“‘I got this script and it was so terrible,’ [Donner] said, ‘I have to save Superman,’” Johns recalled the director telling him. “And, and he did. And that’s why he took it, because he loved the character so much, this American icon, and he had so much passion for it, he said, ‘I can’t let this happen,’ and he made the greatest superhero film still, ever.”
It just goes to show you, that even after all these years, these great men know that without the inspiration of one great man, neither would be where they were.