Man of Steel has been a source of controversy for everyone from the filmmakers to the fans to us here at IGN, so it’s no surprise that Terence Stamp, the original General Zod from Superman II (played by Michael Shannon in the reboot), has something to say about it -- but it’s not what you’d think.
In an interview on Entertainment Weekly Radio to promote his new movie Unfinished Song, Stamp explained why even though he hasn’t seen the film yet, Man of Steel makes him sad.
“When I heard they were remaking it, or they were doing a version of it, I was kind of sad in a way,” Stamp said. “Because it was the benchmark for all of these comic book movies. There’s never been anything quite as good as those **** Donner movies. And since then, big movies have become computer generated. They’ve become unemotional, and so I was sad. I thought it would be diluted, in other words. And that it would be a personal dilution because it was such an incredible moment for me to come back, and to come back and play my first comic book villain. I was sad, but the truth is, I’m sure it’s vastly different… But, hey, you know, they wanted to pull on the Kryptonite boots? Good luck to them. They’re big!”
The conversation turned to his own experiences working on Superman II and the controversy surrounding director Richard Donner being fired and Richard Lester being brought in to finish the film.
“They brought in this director, who was a very, very good director,” said Stamp. “But I was astonished that he’d step into another director’s shoes. I thought, that’s really beneath Richard Lester. He’s bigger than that. And none of us wanted to go back. And we didn’t go back, actually. It was only when Chris Reeve went back that we thought, well, who am I? I’ve been out of work for eight years. I can’t annoy the business, you know? So we all went back, but it was flat. Because it was without Richard Donner,” he said.
Another source of controversy was when Marlon Brando’s Jor-El, played by Russell Crowe in Man of Steel, was cut from the movie.
“Incredibly, they replaced all of Brando’s stuff because he was trying to get a percentage that they had promised him,” Stamp said. “And to weaken his case, they replaced Marlon with this English actress [Susannah York], Superman’s mom. It didn’t seem possible. So it was very unhappy. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do much. We had to do the last sort of eighth of the movie, frankly.”
Probably because no one kneeled 
