Superman III

Superman III is a 1983 movie that is a sequel to Superman II from 1980.

Trivia for Superman III

• In the opening sequence, the location used for downtown Metropolis is Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
• 20 years after playing Lana Lang in Superman III, Annette O'Toole went on to play Martha Kent (Superman's adoptive mother) on the television series Smallville.
• The video game "played" by Ross Webster was created for the film and originally looked very life-like, so much so that the creators were asked to make it look more computer-like, so that the fact that it was actually a game would be more obvious to the audience.
• The program Gus creates in the beginning that is supposedly impossible is just a series of PRINT statements when Gus lists it.
• Margot Kidder (Lois Lane) had less than five minutes of screen time in Superman III as retaliation from the Salkinds after she expressed her disgust to the producers over the firing of director Richard Donner from Superman II.
• Following the use of Lex Luthor in the previous two films, some consideration was given to using Brainiac in the third installment.
• The scenes in which Superman straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa and then leans it back in the end were originally planned to be shot for Superman II, as it was in Richard Donner's original script for the first sequel. The closing shots of Superman in space were lifted from ' and also reused in Superman II and '.
• Enid Saunders plays a character named "Minnie Bannister", seen in one of the Smallville sequences. This is a very obscure in-joke on the part of director Richard Lester, who has had a long association with the cast members of the BBC radio show The Goon Show, where Minnie Bannister, voiced by Spike Milligan, was one of the recurring characters.
• The original title was to be Superman vs. Superman.
• The technique Gus uses to steal money from his company, where he collects very little money (in this case decimals of a cent) from other accounts and aggregates them in his personal account, is called "salami slicing" in computer crime terminology; compare the film Office Space, which explicitly references Superman III.
• When the villains are preparing to visit the site of the super-computer, Ross, Vera, and Lorelei use helicopter-like devices to float to the canyon floor. Gus prefers to ride his burro, stating, "I don't believe a man can fly!" - a reference to the tagline of the first movie in the series, "You'll believe a man can fly!"
• The scene where Superman creates a diamond by squeezing a piece of coal in his hand is a reference to some earlier Superman stories from the comic books where he performed the same action.
• According to the writers, the original choice to play Ross Webster was Alan Alda. They wanted an actor who could be ruthless without losing any charm.
• When it was first revealed to producers that Lana Lang would be a single mother, a comic book was quickly written explaining how Lana came to be in that situation.
• Although this sequel was released two years after Superman II (1980), it had actually been four years since Christopher Reeve filmed the role - his work on the second movie was completed in 1979.
• The 'little boy' who appears waiting by the photo-booth while 'Clark Kent' changes into 'Superman - during the introduction of the film - was actually the same little boy who played 'baby' Kal-El (Superman) in Superman: The Movie (Aaron Smolinski).