After spending more than 15 years traversing the animated wasteland with Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two, director George Miller roared back into live-action stardom this summer with the smash success of Mad Max: Fury Road. But while Miller is presumably thrilled to finally have enough clout to start working on the purely hypothetical Babe 3: This Time, Nothing But Nightmares, he’s likely aware that you’re not really anybody in Hollywood until you’ve sacrificed your unique style on the altar of a big-budget superhero franchise, a milestone that he was brutally robbed of achieving when Warner Bros. pulled the plug on his Justice League movie back in 2007.
Miller might be getting another shot at spandax-clad stardom, though, if a rumor being floated by The Death Of Superman Lives: What Happened? director Jon Schnepp turns out to be true. Appearing on YouTube network Popcorn Talk’s DC Movie News show, Schnepp claimed that Miller has been tapped to direct Man Of Steel 2, the non-Batman related follow-up to Zack Snyder’s city-smashing opus. (Presumably, Snyder would be too busy sucking all the color out of the Justice League’s costumes to direct the movie himself.)
Schnepp, who works as an animator and director for Adult Swim cartoons like The Venture Brothers and Metalocalypse, didn’t cite any sources for the rumor, although he did speak with the easy confidence and authority of a heavily bearded man in a Superman shirt holding forth on the subject of comic book movies. (You can hear him announce the rumor in the clip below, at roughly the 55-minute mark.) Given that the news is being delivered by a man best known for making a documentary about a cool-sounding, ambitious Superman movie that never really had a chance of being made, though, you might want to keep expectations low for ever actually seeing George Miller’s Man Of Steel. (Even if the thought of an Imperator Furiosa’d-up Lois Lane stealing the movie from sad-sack Clark Kent and going on a crazy rampage of trailblazing journalism is exactly the sort of thing that would get someone’s bloodbox pumping hard for a trip to superhero Valhalla.)