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All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

1978’s Superman: The Movie proved to the world that a man could fly — but when it came to the fourth movie in actor Christopher Reeve’s Superman series, things came crashing down to Earth. 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was a critical and commercial flop that cut short the Last Son of Krypton’s movie career for almost two decades — and Reeve knows just who’s to blame for that.

In his 1998 autobiography, Reeve described Superman IV as “simply a catastrophe from start to finish,” adding that the movie was “hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments.”

Specifically, Reeve blames The Cannon Group, the studio responsible for the movie. Cannon had purchased the movie rights to Superman for the project from Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers responsible for the three earlier installments, with ambitions to make a great superhero epic — but the studio’s tendency to financially overextend itself meant that it simply couldn’t afford to spend the same amount of money as earlier movies in the series. (Superman IV cost $17 million to make in 1987 — compared with $55 million for the first movie in the series nine years earlier.)

As Reeve wrote in his autobiography, “Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration. For example, [screenwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark 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. [Superman: The Movie director] 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.”

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

The studio’s penny-pinching didn’t just impact shooting; according to another of the movie’s stars, it changed what happened to the movie in post-production in a pretty major way, as well.

Jon Cryer, who played Lex Luthor’s nephew Lenny in the movie — yes, he played a Luthor decades before he was Lex Luthor on the CW’s Supergirl series — said in a 2024 interview,  “If you watch the movie, they never finished the special effects, so they had to cut huge chunks out of the movie and it doesn't make rational sense anymore.”

Sure enough, anyone who read the 1987 comic book adaptation of Superman IV might remember there were multiple scenes in the comic that didn’t make it to the screen. (Cannon’s version of events has it that 30 minutes of the movie were cut not for budgetary reasons, but because they tested poorly with test audiences.)

Fighting supervillains is one thing, but when it came to fighting cost-cutting measures on multiple fronts, that really proved to be Superman’s kryptonite — so much so that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace would put the Man of Steel on cinematic ice for the next 19 years despite multiple efforts to change that. Just imagine a world where Cannon had spent some super-dollars on the movie, and things turned out differently.

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• The Full House cast addresses some of the series’ biggest continuity errors
• How Spider-Man’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon was saved by a fired Marvel boss — and Ronald McDonald
• How NBC panicked after Diane left Cheers — and why Kirstie Alley’s casting sparked a quiet battle inside the hit show
• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• The 1987 Justice League reboot that made superheroes weird, hilarious, and unexpectedly human
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s