Although Bryan Singer has returned to Fox's X-Men series with the upcoming Days of Future Past, few fans will forget his time with the Superman franchise. Indeed, in a recent interview with Empire magazine, the director looked back on 2006's Superman Returns, and responded to some the criticisms.

"Half of that I understand and half of it I never will," he told the magazine. "It was a movie made for a certain kind of audience. Perhaps more of a female audience. It wasn't what it needed to be, I guess. I think I could lop the first quarter off and start the movie a bit more aggressively and maybe find a way to start the movie with the jet disaster sequence or something. I could have grabbed the audience a little more quickly. I don't know what would have helped. Probably nothing. If I could go again, I would do an origin. I would reboot it."

Interestingly enough, Man of Steel star Henry Cavill was actually up for the lead in Superman Returns, a role that ended up going to Brandon Routh. Singer said he cast the latter because he "was making a sequel to Christopher Reeve and I wanted somebody who embodied Reeve more."

That said, Singer noted how impressed he was with Man of Steel, saying he was "in awe of the world building and the scope." However, he noted there might have been aspects he approached differently.

"I'm not a critic and it starts to get into a weird thing where one director is talking about another director," he said. "I know how hard it is to make a movie, especially one of these movies and especially a Superman movie, and there was so much I was impressed with in that movie. There were things I might have done a little differently just because of the way I view the character. Don't misinterpret that as me not liking something. It's not 'Bryan Singer's review of Man of Steel'!"

(via Movieweb)