In speak­ing with Empire Online, Bryan Singer con­firmed that he will now be focus­ing on the Super­man Returns sequel, with an aim to direct once the project is ready:

“I’m just get­ting back with writ­ers after the strike. We’re just in the devel­op­ment phase. I’m start­ing to develop a sequel…with the inten­tion of direct­ing it.”

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, a judge has ruled that Time Warner are no longer the sole pro­pri­etors of the Super­man fran­chise — with the heirs of co-creator Jerome Siegel hav­ing an enti­tle­ment to the share of the US copy­right. The copy­right cov­ers only a por­tion of the Super­man cre­ation — that being the fun­da­men­tal ele­ments — the cos­tume, Clark Kent, Lois Lane.

In short, this means that Time Warner may now be liable, pend­ing a court appeal, to pay out for Super­man Returns. This rul­ing may also lead the Shuster’s to fol­low suit (the other half of the Super­man cre­ation team) and claim another large por­tion of the copy­right. Ulti­mately it all puts the future of The Man of Steel into jeop­ardy, not to men­tion the already trou­bled Jus­tice League film.

NYTimes

Rumors are quickly cir­cu­lat­ing around the inter­net that the two stars of Super­man Returns — Super­man him­self, Bran­don Routh and direc­tor Bryan Singer, will not be return­ing for the sequel. The Vari­ety Blog explained why we may be unlikely to see Bryan Singer tak­ing part in the film:

Speak­ing of DC Comics pics, it is highly unlikely that Bryan Singer will return to shoot the next Super­man movie. (The direc­tor is fin­ish­ing up Tom Cruise’s Nazi film Valkyrie, and prep­ping The Mayor of Cas­tro Street).

This is a rumor, and we need to wait for con­fir­ma­tion from stu­dios that this is the case. For now we can hold our breath.

And for a seem­ingly dou­ble blow, Latino Review sug­gested for a moment that Bran­don Routh would also be out. How­ever, the ever faith­ful and reli­able Aint it Cool News entered into the fray to get some reli­able clo­sure on the issue:

I just got off the phone with a very high-ranking mole who is absolutely in a posi­tion to know what’s hap­pen­ing with this film, and he tells me that it is “absolutely false” that Bran­don Routh is out as Super­man for the stand-alone series.

The only thing that has been deter­mined is that JUSTICE LEAGUE will not fea­ture the actors from the other films. That’s it.

Right now, Routh is still Warner’s choice to return if they make another stand-alone SUPERMAN film, and that’s based on con­ver­sa­tions as recently as a few weeks ago.

Don’t believe this one, kids. Routh’s still the Man of Steel.

It seems like the whole crazy rumor orig­i­nated through rum­blings in the Jus­tice League movie camp.

Vari­ety are run­ning an inter­est­ing report con­cern­ing the next Super­man film, dubbed Man of Steel,

“Super­man Returns” scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Har­ris have opted not to come back and pen a sequel to the 2006 sum­mer pic that would have reunited them with helmer Bryan Singer. The three also worked together on “X2: X-Men United.”

The arti­cle con­tin­ues, stat­ing that WB are now accept­ing pitches for new writ­ers. There is also some spec­u­la­tion about the nature of the next movie, some say­ing that it will be rev­o­lu­tionised in the same way that the new Hulk fea­ture is being improved, whilst the WB are adamant that it will remain a true sequel to Super­man Returns.

The ever infor­ma­tive and inter­est­ing Quint over at AICN has heard some rumors cir­cu­lat­ing about the next Super­man movie involv­ing one par­tic­u­lar actor from Super­man I and II repris­ing his role. I’ll let Quint Continue…

This [source] has per­son­ally observed Bryan Singer at work on VALKYRIE and appar­ently [Singer] has been putting pres­sure on one of his cast mem­bers to return to his star-making role as a vil­lain in Singer’s SUPERMAN sequel.

That, of course, would be Ter­ence Stamp, the role would be that of Gen­eral Zod.

For some back­ground read­ing on the Zod sub­ject I rec­om­mend Wikipedia, which has sum­maries of Zod’s his­tory and role within the Super­man movie universe.

Once Mil­i­tary Direc­tor of the Kryp­ton­ian Space Cen­ter, Zod had known Jor-El, Superman’s father, when he was an aspir­ing sci­en­tist. When the space pro­gram was abol­ished after the destruc­tion of the moon Wegthor (caused by rene­gade sci­en­tist Jax-Ur), he attempted to take over Kryp­ton. Zod cre­ated an army of robotic dupli­cates of him­self, all bear­ing a resem­blance to Bizarro. He was sen­tenced to the Phan­tom Zone for his crimes.

A blog net­work deliv­er­ing the lat­est news updates on a range of in-production block­buster movies.

Recently a lot of “will they wont they” dis­cus­sion has been aired about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a Jus­tice League movie; ide­ally recruit­ing Chris­t­ian Bale as Bat­man and Bran­don Routh as Super­man — amongst oth­ers. These rumors were orig­i­nally fuelled by two Vari­ety arti­cles, the first reveal­ing that Warner Bros. were look­ing into the movie’s development,

“The Jus­tice League of Amer­ica has been a peren­nial favorite for gen­er­a­tions of fans, and we believe their appeal to film audi­ences will be as strong and diverse as the char­ac­ters themselves.”

And the sec­ond enti­tled “Jus­tice League film gets script”.

Husband-wife writ­ing duo Kieran Mul­roney and Michele Mul­roney turned in a first draft that had Warner Bros. suits actu­ally smiling

How would this film­ing sched­ule work in-between TDK and Man of Steel? Would the cor­rect cast be present? These are the ques­tions being asked. The IESB had a chance to talk to Chris­t­ian Bale, he stated cat­e­gor­i­cally that he was not involved in the adap­ta­tion and nor had he been approached. And later Moviehole con­firmed that the WB are look­ing for an all new cast and that the movie was “full steam ahead” with cast­ing start­ing imme­di­ately. They also men­tioned an assigned direc­tor, George Miller (Happy Feet meets Mad Max).

All this seemed a lit­tle con­fus­ing until the final and fit­ting piece of the puz­zle unearthed, how this could be pos­si­ble with­out dis­may­ing fans and whilst aim­ing for an early 2008 pro­duc­tion sched­ule. The IESB have a num­ber of some­what reli­able sources stat­ing that the JLA movie shall in fact be a CGI/Motion Cap­ture film (e.g. sim­i­lar to The Polar Express or more recently Beowulf). This still needs some clo­sure but it all makes per­fect sense. These films tra­di­tion­ally take slightly longer to cre­ate so we could see a late 2009, sum­mer 2010 release.

Brain over at the Blue Tights forums was lucky enough to bump into Mike Dougherty, screen­writer for Man of Steel. This is what he had to say,

I asked him if he was a part of the sequel because every­thing I have seen says Singer and Har­ris are writ­ing the script and that he isn’t men­tioned. He con­firmed that he is writ­ing it with the two just like the last pic­ture. I then expressed to him that I was hop­ing the delays of Super­man: The Man of Steel weren’t true. He said that they were on track and that the goal is still to have the movie out in the Sum­mer of 2009. He seemed a lit­tle hes­i­tant about it but did his best to try and reas­sure that it will get done by then. I asked if he could give any more info on the film. He responded, “There are TWO vil­lains,” and he smiled.