Continuity mistake: When evil Superman crushes Clark's glasses, they swap around 180ยบ between shots.
Continuity mistake: The tornado in Colombia blows out some candles, but they all appear lit up again a shot later.
Continuity mistake: When Gus flies away with the skis, the sky keeps changing from cloudy to sunny all the time.
Continuity mistake: In the junkyard, when Clark takes the iron lid and gets out of the hole, he leans on his right. In the following shot he is coming out again and repeating the movement.
Continuity mistake: After evil Superman makes a hole on the side of the oil tanker, he flies away and we get to see a bird's eye view of the ship. But now the hole is gone.
Continuity mistake: When Gus is falling from the building on his skis the sky changes colour from shot to shot.
Continuity mistake: When Superman enters the acid storage room we have a glance at the temperature needle and we can see it is way to the right; but the chemist is calm and no alerts are active. Minutes later, before the place explodes, while Superman is freezing the lake, the lights in the room turn red and the chemist freaks out, but the needle is further away from the danger zone than it was when we first saw it.
Continuity mistake: When Superman extinguishes the flame on the toy penguin, it looks brand new, as opposed to the worn out look it had a couple seconds before.
Continuity mistake: In the scene where the blind man picks the painting machine, note that there are some water marks on the pavement going to the right. These are not visible in the next shot.
Continuity mistake: When the penguins are on the floor, a wide shot shows a man picking two of them, each with each hand. The close-up shows his hands empty.
Continuity mistake: The aerial view of the Grand Canyon shows Ross bending over to prepare his flying vehicle. In the next shot he is up.
Continuity mistake: When Superman is getting drunk, he pours some nuts out onto the bar. When it's a close-up, the nuts are many and close together. Next shot, the nuts are more sparse and scattered.
Continuity mistake: In Ross's office, when Gus makes the liquor shelve turn around, the way his jacket is done up changes between shots.
Continuity mistake: During the junkyard fight, the sky colour keeps changing from cloudy to sunny all the time.
Continuity mistake: The diamond Superman makes by compressing a piece of coal would not be cut into a diamond shape like that, and a diamond made from a piece of coal that size wouldn't be nearly as big as it was.
Continuity mistake: From the wide shots, the black stripe on the side of the oil tanker is 12 to 15 meters wide, but on the close-up of evil Superman destroying the tanker shows it's thinned to barely a couple meters wide.
Continuity mistake: When Clark is below the steel lid, the shadow he casts moves around depending on the shot.
Continuity mistake: After the truck falls off the bridge, before Superman arrives a red truck passes by a green one and keeps on to the other end of the bridge. When the angle changes, a split second later, the red truck is now several feet back, not running and parked next to the green truck.
Continuity mistake: In the Olympics ceremony, the file footage shows very few people by the final steps to the cauldron. When the shot changes to the modern footage, a lot of people have suddenly appeared there, plus they change bewteen shots.
Continuity mistake: When Ross is reading a newspaper in his office, the black paper clips move around between shots.
Answer: There were rumors that Hackman was angry with the Salkind Brothers (the producers) for firing director Richard Donner, though Hackman later disputed saying that. His explanation, though he may have been downplaying the real reason, was that he had a number of other movie projects at the time, and he also did not wish to continually play the same villain in an ongoing movie series.
raywest ★