sad thing is, making a movie that will satisfy all but the most hard-core geeks, and making a successful flim are not mutally exclusive.  i think LOTR proved that pretty damn well.  sure, there were complaints about things like filling glorfindel's role with arwen, but in a film, you can't really have extraneous elf-lords hanging about.  and how many people honestly missed tom bombadil?

what was most jarring about "superman returns" was not just the vouyerism.  it was the juxtaposition of that with all the fucking superman as christ imagery.  in one scene you have your hero fly into the stratosphere and pause, arms outstretched in a cross, bathed in sunlight, before descending to rescue people from a runaway plane.  then, later in the same film, have him act as superpowered peeping tom?  one doesn't have to be  comics geek to question that.  can't have it both ways.