JJ Abrams' 'Star Trek' Victory Lap

Even before “Star Trek” launches into the stratosphere this weekend, director JJ Abrams is taking a victory lap.

With the film hogging 81% of all ticket sales at Fandango.com as well as the covers of Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly and Wired (which Abrams guest edited), the director has just done a great sit down with Charlie Rose.

Now Rose can be an enormous chucklehead when interviewing Hollywood types (especially pretty ones), but that doesn’t matter. Abrams is smart enough to make it interesting on his own.

He talks about the influence of Richard Donner’s “Superman,” which he says gave “a kind of legitimacy” to comic book subjects they’d never received before. Donner “respected the characters as much as the audience,” Abrams says. “They were funny. They were real.”

He remembers seeing “Superman’s” poster promising “You Will Believe A Man Can Fly,” and feeling the film delivered on that promise: It was real and made you believe its fantastic circumstances.

“Clark Kent was a character,” says Abrams. “He was no longer a comic book.

I couldn’t agree more.

For more on “Superman,” as well as Abrams on his meeting with Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise and his love for “Jaws,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Die Hard,” click here.