Warner Bros. While Superman—also known as Clark Kent, also known as Kal-El—may tend to look youthful in his many on-screen appearances, the character is now in his sixth decade of major feature films. While that seems like a long time—and, really, it is—there are only a handful of movies featuring the character, and most of them are not connected to many others. What does that mean? Well, let's start out with Richard Donner's Superman , the 1978 movie that started it all. The movie spawned three sequels and a spinoff of its own (some good, some not so good), but, basically, the buck stopped there. The Henry Cavill Superman you've seen in the last half decade is entirely unrelated.