Superman Returns Movie

Sydney, Australia IN a secret corner of a warehouse here, the biggest star of one of the biggest movies of 2006 was hidden away all of last summer. Outside eyes were not welcome and sunlight was blocked out to avoid its aging effects. But on one rainy day in June, the star's keeper allowed a rare visit. "Not a lot of people get to see this," she said with a conspiratorial whisper as her key clicked open the lock.

THE tall, handsome guy with the square jaw and the Midwest manners was comfortably anonymous when he arrived at the lunchtime patio of Il Piccolino on Robertson, but the staff began whispering when the gentleman stepped back outside to have his photograph taken for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. By the time Brandon Routh sat back down for lunch, his secret identity was pretty much shot. "They figured out who I am, but, you know, usually I don't get too many people recognizing me.

Warner Bros. Pictures hopes "Superman Returns" will be able to leap an extremely long weekend in a single bound. The studio has decided to move up the release of the film to June 28, getting a two-day jump on what for many people will be a four-day weekend, with July 4 falling on a Tuesday. It had been set to open June 30.

STUDIOS love magazine stories that breathlessly hype their summer popcorn movies, so you would think that Warner Bros. might have been happy with Alonso Duralde's cover story about "Superman Returns," which gushed, "Superheroes -- let's face it -- are totally hot." There was a twist: Duralde's "Superman Returns" story was not in Entertainment Weekly or Newsweek or Premiere.

Bryan Singer was gushing about some in-your-face Smallville corn. "Look at that! Oh, look at the corn." The director of "Superman Returns," wearing plastic 3-D glasses, was sitting in an empty Imax theater at Universal City a few days ago where he saw his own movie in an unexpected way.

Spirits were sky high, sometimes literally, at Wednesday night's world premiere of "Superman Returns." At the after-party, the cast -- Kate Bosworth (Lois Lane), Kevin Spacey (Lex Luthor), Parker Posey, Frank Langella, James Marsden and that hot new Man of Steel, Brandon Routh -- were all ecstatic about the raves for the iconic superhero's return to the big screen.

Noel Neill and Jack Larson spent some of their best years in bondage, trussed up together waiting for Superman to break down a wall and save them. The actors who played Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s TV show "Adventures of Superman" are back at it with bit parts in "Superman Returns" -- Neill as a dying heiress, Larson as a bartender. "Superman Returns" director Bryan Singer grew up a fan of the TV show, which starred the late George Reeves as the Man of Steel.

WHEN Hollywood composer John Ottman, who wrote the scores for director Bryan Singer's "The Usual Suspects" and "X2: X-Men United," was approached about scoring Singer's latest, "Superman Returns," he admits he was a bit daunted. "There was a great weight on my shoulders because of the strength of the original theme," he says of the John Williams melody that accompanied director Richard Donner's 1978 film "Superman."

This summer, moviegoers will flock to theaters to see the Man of Steel battle archnemesis Lex Luthor in "Superman Returns." But the $200-million-plus comic book extravaganza also marks another drama-filled return: the reemergence of movie producer Jon Peters. He was the onetime hairdresser whose romance with Barbra Streisand led to an almost unfathomable ascent to blockbuster producer and then studio power broker. His messy 1991 departure as co-chairman of Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc.