When Richard Donner made his seminal “Superman” in 1978, he made sure to treat the source material with as much reverence as was humanly possible. That was basically the director’s guiding principle, with Donner telling Den of Geek in 2018 that he set out to “make a good Movie about this beloved character and treat him with our greatest respect.”

Zack Snyder, unlike Bryan Singer with his 2006 effort “Superman Returns,” had no intention of repeating Donner’s movies. In fact, both he and writer David S. Goyer, who previously penned Christopher Nolan’s 2005 origin story “Batman Begins,” wanted to delve into the darker side of the Man of Steel. And they certainly managed that. In “Man of Steel,” Superman is not only forced to kill Zod, he ends his invasion of Earth by snapping the villain’s neck in a pretty intense scene that immediately divided fans. No wonder Donner wasn’t a fan of the DCEU’s version of Superman.

But there were originally plans for a scene that would have foreshadowed and given important context to Kal-El’s later brutality. Speaking to Movie Web, Goyer explained how he’d written a scene involving Kevin Costner’s Jonathan Kent showing his adopted son, Clark, what it means to take a life:

“Ironically there was a scene we wrote that didn’t get filmed in which Jonathan takes Young Clark hunting and they kill a deer, and young Clark is just gutted by the act and Jonathan says, ‘It’s a powerful thing to take a life, even if you’re forced to take a life’. That was a scene that didn’t make it into the final movie, we never filmed it.”