MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The production of the Masters of the Universe film helped ruin the production of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
Cannon Films was one of the strangest movie studios in the 1980s, in part because their failures were just SO visible, and in the process, they took down two of the most popular heroes of the 1980s, He-Man and Superman.
What later became known as Cannon Films actually started as a small film distributor in 1967, when two young friends, Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey, came up with the idea of importing some Swedish softcore pornographic films to the United States, with English subtitles. The films did well and Friedland and Dewey started producing their own low budget films, with one of their first films, Joe, becoming a surprise success. The film, starring Peter Boyle, Dennis Patrick and a young Susan Sarandon, was about a man who kills his daughter's drug-dealing hippie boyfriend after his daughter (Sarandon) overdoses and almost dies. Another man, the titular Joe (Boyle), finds out about it and convinces the man to help him kill more hippies. The two become vigilantes and kill a bunch of hippies, but inadvertently the man kills his own daughter. Made for less than $200,000, it grossed almost $20 million in 1970 and was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. Despite their early success, the company fell into financial distress by the late 1970s and it was purchased by Israeli film producer cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus in 1979.
Golan and Globus had a fascinating game plan for their new company. They would basically purchase tons of scripts for little money and make a lot of low budget films, under the theory that even if seven out of ten films bombed, that the three successful films would make enough money to pay for all of the films because of the low budgets. Their plans worked during the early 1980s as they had a string of low budget action films become major hits, most notably their series of Chuck Norris films (with Norris’ Rambo-esque Missing in Action likely being their biggest hit). However, by the end of the decade, the company began to experience what I guess you would call Icarus-syndrome. They became so successful that they tried to get closer and closer to the sun. They began spending more and more money on their films, financing them at least partially through the junk bond market. With bigger budgets, films that failed suddenly had a much bigger impact on their bottom line.
Enter Superman and the Masters of Universe.
Golan and Globus wanted to be at the top of the film industry, so they tried to make some major splashes and that involved signing big licenses. The issue was that Golan and Globus were not really all that familiar with American popular culture. They really only knew Superman and Superman was already locked up by the father and son producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind.
The Salkinds, though, were having some financial issues of their own, after the disappointing box office results of Superman III and the downright failures of Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie, so they agreed to license out the production of the next Superman film to Golan and Globus (a deal worked out when all four were attending the Cannes Film Festival in 1985). Basically, they would pay the Salkinds $5 million for simply the rights to produce a Superman movie. Everything else, Golan and Globus would have to do on their own.
The problem was that their new, higher budget movies, were ALL BOMBING. Their $25 million science fiction epic, Lifeforce, made less than half its budget back. They gave Sylvester Stallone alone $12 million dollars to get him, at the height of his fame, to do a movie for them and the resulting film, Over The Top, lost almost half of its $25 million budget, as well.
In the middle of all of this, Golan and Globus kept signing other big deals, now doing pretty much the exact opposite of their old approach, which was now that they needed a blockbuster to cover all of their other losses, so they cut licensing deals with Spider-Man and with the Masters of the Universe (Producer Edward R. Pressman had previously cut a deal with Mattel, so they had to work out a deal with him, as well). Like I said before, they weren't even aware of who these characters were, so they were just asking "Who are the biggest properties out there?" and signing them and in the mid-1980s, Masters of the Universe was HUGE.
Golan and Globus were able to raise a bunch of money by selling future distribution rights (VHS and cable) to their films, with Superman IV being the big jewel in their crown, so the company was able to raise enough money where it could spend $36 million on Superman IV. The problem was that its initial $17 million budget for the Masters of the Universe film was quickly proving to be not enough and so it seemed as though director Gary Goddard was not going to be able to actually FINISH the movie.
So Golan and Globus simply took the budget for Superman IV and cut it in half and spread that money around to its other films, so that Masters of the Universe was able to finish filming, but now Superman IV had less of a budget than even the Masters of the Universe movie!
Christopher Reeve wrote of the experience in his biography, Still Me:
We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration. For example, Konner and 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. Richard 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.
Jon Cryer once claimed that the filming of Superman IV didn't really ever technically finish, it just ran out of money so it simply stopped. Whether that's true or not, it was clear that Superman IV was filmed on far too small of a budget and the resulting film was a disaster.
It was a disaster for Cannon, as well, as while Superman IV at least made money (less than its original budget, though), Masters of the Universe, the film the studio was really pinning all of its hopes on, did not even make back its budget. The whole company was teetering on the brink of disaster.
Despite their near financial ruin, Golan and Globus still tried to do a sequel to Masters of the Universe AND a Spider-Man movie. I wrote in an old Movie Legends Revealed about how that failed miserably, but ultimately gave us a pretty good Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
The Cannon Group folded in 1994.
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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