Of all the Superman Returns criticism – about the the religious allegories and the stupid baby and, oh, everything – one fact got lost in the mix.

And that was that the Superman Returns Superman was a bit rubbish. As Superman, Brandon Routh had all the charisma of a mannequin with a polystyrene Christopher Reeve head. If anyone was ever silly enough to make a sequel to Superman Returns, then surely they’d do the decent thing and ditch Brandon Routh, right?

Wrong! According to DC Comics President Paul Levitz, Brandon Routh is definitely still on to make the Superman Returns sequel. Although it seems a bit of a wasted opportunity to bring back Brandon Routh, perhaps you can understand Levitz’s rationale once you’ve heard what the new Superman movie is going to be called – Superman Stands Around Unconvincingly. Genius.

2008 has, by and large, been a good year for superhero movies. Iron Man had vim and wit and swagger, The Dark Knight had complex, highbrow sensibilities and a man with a silly gruff voice and The Incredible Hulk had… um. Anyway, it’s a good year for superhero movies.

Unlike 2006. And that’s because 2006 was the year of Superman Returns. Superman Returns was hands down the worst Superman movie ever made and, given that the other Superman movies featured Superman splitting in half, an evil Superman being created out of some hair, a robot with wire for hair and a bearded baddie from another planet who had a face shaped like a shoebox, that’s really saying something.

The things that audiences wanted – like Superman throwing skyscrapers into the sun and eye-lasering petrol stations until they exploded – were completely missing from Superman Returns, and in their place was soppy girl-eyed mimsying, a sort of Superman version of Scrappy Doo and Kate titting Bosworth. Superman Returns was so terrible that, even though it was the sixth-biggest movie of the year, not even the producers seemed keen to make a sequel.

And then, not so long ago, we started to hear murmurs of a ‘reboot’. The Superman Returns writers were ditched, and it seemed as though people wanted to pretend that the movie never happened at all. And that meant getting rid of Brandon Routh.

Oh, you know. Brandon Routh. The chap who played Superman. Tall guy. Giant penis. Zero charisma. Like watching a particularly uninteresting bowl of dust. Oh, you know. Anyway, rumours from a couple of months ago seemed to suggest that Brandon Routh’s rubbish services were no longer required for this Superman reboot, but now we’re hearing differently.

Latino Review spoke to DC Comics President Paul Levitz, and he gave the impression that Brandon Routh is going to be Superman forever! Or at least until the next Superman movie when everyone realises that they didn’t actually like him all along and the movie flops horribly.

In fact, he told me that “Last week Brandon Routh has come around the offices in New York and Los Angeles as of late to talk about Superman and what we want to do”… Brandon? He did say Brandon Routh was coming around talking about Superman! Why the hell would they be talking to Brandon if he was not going to be part of the reboot? Because he’s still in the mix!!!

Actually, we’ve been a bit hard on Brandon Routh here. Maybe if the Superman Returns sequel has a better script and asks him to do more than sit in a tree staring forlornly at Kate titting Bosworth, he’ll be able to deliver more. Besides, if Brandon Routh ever got dropped as Superman, we all know exactly who’d be taking his place.

Shia LaBeouf. And nobody wants that to happen. Unless they’re weird.