MOVIE NEWS – Jon Peters is hardly a big name for movie buffs and DC fans alike, but they probably know his work, since he was the producer of such movies as Batman, Caddyshack, and technically Man of Steel as well. The funny thing is: he didn’t actually work on that latter movie. The man started out, strangely enough, as a hairdresser and eventually became a bit time Hollywood producer. So how successful is Peters? Well, he was smart enough, to earn about $80 million for doing absolutely nothing on both Superman Returns and Man of Steel.

Jon Peters recently spoke about that in an interview to The Hollywood Reporter. Just to give an idea what the kind of man Jon Peters is, the journalist of THR report told that he had a loaded gun on the table during the interview. He was asked about on and he revealed that it was actually quite a bit more than that between the last two Superman movies and by his account, it was between $80 and $85 million.

“I have 7.5 percent of the gross. Together they did [more than] a billion,” told Peters to the journalist.

To make the quite long and complicated story short, Jon Peters worked very hard in the 90s to get a movie that is most commonly known as Superman Lives made, which would have starred Nicolas Cage as the famed caped superhero. The comedian Kevin Smith wrote the initial script for the movie and Jon Peters insisted that Superman fight a giant spider in the movie. Kevin Smith worked that into his script, but called the spider a “Thanagarian Snare Beast,” which was a reference to the planet Thanagar and Hawkman.

Superman Lives got stuck in development for several years with Tim Burton attached to direct. The two worked together on Batman and Batman Returns, so he seemed like the logical choice at the time for Superman Lives. Still, that movie never got made, but because Jon Peters led the project, he still retained that 7.5 percent of the gross that he mentioned, which is why he was able to make so much money from Superman Returns and Man of Steel. The former made just shy of $400 million worldwide and the latter made a pretty impressive $668 million, so there was plenty of profit for Jon Peters to share in. The inner proceedings of the movie business are quite complex, but it is probably astounding for anyone to hear that someone could make so much money for doing what boils down to absolutely nothing.

Jon Peters is rather notorious for his crazy demands and weird way of breaking into the industry. He was first the hairdresser and lover of Barbara Streisand and started producing some of her movies like A Star is Born. He was apparently so crazy on getting a giant spider into a movie that it finally worked out into the famous Will Smith movie flop Wild Wild West, while it wasn’t something that was originally intended to be in the movie. Crazy or not, he has definitely found a way to make a lot of money as a producer.

Peters later wasn’t allowed on the set of Man of Steel, because producer Christopher Nolan didn’t want him there. According to Peters, that’s because his “reputation scares these guys.”