Steel

Steel (1997)

Heroes don't come any bigger.

When a renegade military reject puts new superweapons in dangerous hands, John Henry Irons becomes Steel. Wearing body armor, wielding a fearsome electrohammer and riding a gadget-packed motorcycle, he's ready to wage war... if he can fix the untimely glitches in his untested gear.

Date of release
1997-08-15
TMDB
4.2 / 10 (299)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Science Fiction, Action, Crime, Fantasy
Director
Kenneth Johnson

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $1.7M
  • Budget: $16M
  • Earned 0.1× its budget
  • Based on: Steel
  • Filmed in: Los Angeles

Steel is a 1997 American superhero film based on the DC Comics character of the same name. The film stars Shaquille O'Neal as John Henry Irons and his alter-ego Steel, Annabeth Gish as his wheelchair-using partner Susan Sparks, and Judd Nelson as their rival Nathaniel Burke.

Production

Production of the film Steel started with music producer Quincy Jones and his partner David Salzman. Both Jones and Salzman were fans of the Steel character, especially Jones, who found personal reasons to support the project. Jones stated that he found children's "perspective on the future has changed for the worse, and I hate seeing young people who don't believe in the future.

Kenneth Johnson was the screenwriter and director of Steel. Johnson was originally uninterested in doing a superhero film, having previously turned down similar projects after the success of his television series The Bionic Woman, Alien Nation, and The Incredible Hulk. Film producer Joel Simon described Steel as being different, stating that he was "a knight in shining armor in a contemporary setting".

Johnson described Steel's persona as a "blue-collar Batman" and removed Steel from his comic book storyline and replaced it with protagonists and antagonists of his own invention. To aid with the urban aspects of the dialog, Johnson took a copy of the script to South Central Los Angeles and spent a day with a group of kids to ensure that the language of some of the characters was more believable.

The filming schedule consisted of fifty-one days with thirty-two full nights of shooting in downtown Los Angeles. The shooting schedule presented difficulties for the director due to the schedule of the star Shaquille O'Neal. O'Neal was already committed for playing in the 1996 Summer Olympics, and training at the Los Angeles Lakers' camp in Hawaii. This left Johnson with five weeks to complete filming all scenes with O'Neal.

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