“Superman Returns was supposed to be the sure thing. But considering the expense of making the picture, it has to do huge numbers just to come out okay. And it needs to do more than come out okay. An event film like Superman is supposed to make up for the other movies that fail. “If what you can say at the end of it all is, ‘We broke even,’ that’s awful,” says a top executive at another studio. “It’s not why you mount this type of movie. They’re so painful, they’re so stressful, they use up so much capital and they tie up the infrastructure. You need those to give back and when they don’t, it’s costly.” — taken from Kim Master‘s Slate piece on the financial pospects facing Bryan Singer’s film. Masters’ piece starts out noting that Superman Returns is going to get clobbered when Pirates 2 opens on July 7th, but she fails to mention one small but possibly crucial detail: Superman Returns is about something — it has a heart and a soul — and Pirates is about dead fucking nothing. If inner values mean anything to anyone out there, uperman Returns might hang around a little longer than the handicappers are predicting.