Their popularity might be diminishing (at least, according to the box-office) but if you want to make a lot of money, creating a superhero movie is still a pretty good way to do it. However, that wasn’t the cast back in 1978, when the first Superman movie hit the big screen.
Starring Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve, the action movie was a huge success and is still regarded as one of the best movies to come from the superhero movie genre. It broke new ground with its use of VFX, helping to pave the way for the grand action movies of the ’80s.
Suffice to say, it still has legions of fans even in this era of new movies from the DCU. And, as it turns out, one of those fans is a Marvel comic book legend Mark Millar.
In an interview with Empire from back in 2008, Mark Millar’s love of Superman 1978 was revealed. Within the interview, it was reported that Millar was effectively a super-fan, and that this had spilled over into collecting props from the DC movie. One of those props was fairly standard: Christopher Reeve’s cape. But, Millar also owns something far yuckier.
Empire stated, “A massive Superman fan, Millar not only owns Christopher Reeve’s cape but, rather disturbingly, the stuffed corpse of the white cat that Supes rescues from a tree in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman The Movie.”
Sorry, what? A stuffed corpse of the cat that Superman rescued sounds like it would be far more suitable for some kind of superhero movie museum exhibition rather than a fan’s own personal collection, but to each their own.
And, with his own status as a comic book legend, Millar may have earned the right to choose even the most grotesque props. Millar is credited with writing the inspiration for the first Avengers movie, and he also wrote the Civil War mini-series and Old Man Logan storyline: both of which would go on to be adapted into movies in their own right.