Superman IV: The Quest For Peace - Production

Production

In 1983, following the mixed-to-negative reaction to Superman III, Reeve and the producers, Alexander Salkind and his son Ilya, assumed that the Superman films had run their course. Reeve was slated to make a cameo in 1984's Supergirl but was unavailable; the film was a box office failure. Four years later, Ilya Salkind sold the Superman franchise to Golan & Globus of Cannon Films.

According to Reeve, Golan & Globus did not have a script in mind when they first approached him about doing the fourth installment; they simply wanted him to reprise his role. Reeve himself admitted in his autobiography Still Me that he really wasn't sure that he wanted to do another Superman film, He had particular reservations about a reprisal of the role if it was going to be treated as a farce, which had been the case with the third film. This was an approach that Reeve felt was disrespectful to fans and the source material. The new producers then offered Reeve a deal he couldn't refuse – in exchange for starring in the fourth Superman film, Reeve was promised story input (there was also talk of having Reeve direct a fifth Superman film should the fourth one prove successful), and they would produce any project of his choosing. Reeve accepted, and in exchange, Golan & Globus produced the crime drama Street Smart. Unfortunately, Golan & Globus had so many other films in their pipeline at the time that their money was spread too thinly to properly accommodate what became Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, released in 1987, forcing the film's veteran director Sidney J. Furie to cut corners everywhere. The film was panned by critics and fans alike.

In Reeve's autobiography Still Me, he described filming Superman IV:

We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration. For example, Konner and Rosenthal wrote a scene in which Superman lands on 42nd Street and walks down the double yellow lines to the United Nations, where he gives a speech. If that had been a scene in Superman I, we would actually have shot it on 42nd Street. Dick Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street like the Pied Piper. Instead, we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere. Even if the story had been brilliant, I don't think that we could ever have lived up to the audience's expectations with this approach.

Mark Rosenthal's DVD commentary pointed to this scene as an example of Cannon's budget slashing. According to Rosenthal, Reeve and director, Furie, begged to be able to film that sequence in New York in front of the real United Nations because everyone knew what New York and the United Nations was supposed to look like and that the Milton Keynes setting looked nothing like it. However Cannon refused. According to Rosenthal, they were "pinching pennies at every step" and that it was impossible to look at the location and think of it as the United Nations, but more like a municipal auditorium, which is, according to Rosenthal, exactly what it was.

Rosenthal has also described the final film as Cannon stabbing Christopher Reeve in the back. He also revealed on the Deluxe Edition DVD that he and writer Lawrence Konner wanted Reeve to play Nuclear Man as well as his dual roles of Superman and Clark Kent in the film. They imagined the villain being a darker version of the hero in the cloning process. This would be financially expensive and was already explored in minor detail in Superman III. So Cannon decided to hire Mark Pillow instead for the part of Nuclear Man in the final film.

According to Jon Cryer, who played Lex Luthor's nephew Lenny, Reeve had taken him aside just before the release and told him it was going to be "terrible". Although Cryer enjoyed working with Reeve and Gene Hackman, Cryer claimed that Cannon ran out of money five months ahead of time and ultimately released an unfinished movie.