Through no fault of his own, Brendan Fraser’s track record with getting stories from the DC universe off the page and onto the screen hasn’t been a great one. Long before that elusive Batgirl film got shot and shelved, there was a time when the Oscar-winning star was almost up, up and away in Superman: Flyby. Among the many nearly, but not quite, projects that tried to bring the Man of Steel to life, Flyby was produced and penned by J.J. Abrams and, at the time, set to be directed by Brett Ratner. This take was set to lean more into a science-fiction angle for the Last Son of Krypton with an origin story that saw his homeworld in full-blown civil war.
Talking about the time he came close to knocking on the door of the Fortress of Solitude on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Fraser recalled reading a script and even donning the costume. "Oh, I loved that screenplay. They let me read it. They locked me in an empty office in, I don't know, some studio lot. [I] signed an NDA. It was printed black, on crimson paper, so you couldn't photocopy it or sneak it out the door inscospicuously.”
