It’s been a wild Sundance — wilder than usual. There was Kristen Stewart’s lesbian thriller. There was 94-year-old June Squibb doing her own stunts. There was Will Ferrell’s documentary about his road trip with his trans bestie. There was also that documentary about Christopher Reeve, best known for playing Superman and whose life was upended by an accident that left him paraplegic. Surely the film is deeply moving, which is probably why it’s become one of the fest’s most coveted titles.
Per The Wrap, the film, entitled Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, has “multiple buys” who are “circling” the film. How high are the offers? Pretty high! Sources say they’re in the $10 million range, which is high but not quite as enormous as the $17.5 million Fox Searchlight forked over for the 2016 docudrama The Birth of a Nation. Still, it’s in the range of other all-time purchases, such as Little Miss Sunshine ($10.5 million in 2006), Manchester by the Sea ($10 million in 2016), and Hamlet 2 ($10 million in 2008).
Reeve was but an esteemed Juilliard grad and theater rat when he was tapped to play the Man of Steel in 1978’s Superman: The Movie, the first big-screen live-action comic book movie that took the material seriously. Reeve returned for three more outings, all while juggling more serious films. Indeed, at the doc’s premiere Reeve’s kids said when their hometown theater wanted to hold a screening in their father’s honor, they insisted they play 1993’s Remains of the Day, in which he had a supporting turn of which he was extraordinarily proud.
In 1995 Reeve was thrown from a horse, an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair and on a ventilator. He died in 2004, aged 52.
(Via The Wrap)