Pulling the plug on Superman

Documentary looks at how a Man of Steel movie suffered a studio meltdown.

Between the death of the first “Batman” movie franchise and the current superhero boom, Warner Bros. hired director Tim Burton to revamp Superman — then abruptly pulled the plug after months of pre-production and millions of dollars.

Jon Schnepp’s entertaining documentary “The Death of ‘Superman Lives’: What Happened?” talks to insiders about why the picture never got made and what might’ve been.

Aside from Nicolas Cage (a controversial choice to play the Man of Steel), the project’s major players are on the record here, including Burton, producer Jon Peters and former Warner Bros. boss Lorenzo di Bonaventura. The doc also has an interview with a hilariously foulmouthed Kevin Smith, who clashed with Peters over an early version of Smith’s script.

Schnepp’s passion-project (largely crowd-funded) is an often insightful reminder of what Smith calls Hollywood’s “1996 mentality” when it came to superheroes. Even beyond “Superman Lives,” this is a lively, opinionated movie about how the studios stopped trusting creative people to generate blockbuster box office from men in capes.

Similar to the recent “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” about director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt to adapt that Frank Herbert novel, Schnepp’s film uses original concept art and test footage to explain what Burton and Cage had in mind. The result is a compelling “what if ” that not only rebuts longstanding fan speculation that the filmmakers were going to make something embarrassingly silly but also suggests that Warner Bros. sacrificed potential greatness.