Nicolas Cage Shares New Details about His Moment as the Caped Crusader in ‘Superman Lives’
With Warner Bros. pouring in over $40 million into pre-production for Superman Lives before giving up, the film is without a doubt one of the most famous films that never made it to the big screen. Aside from the tidbits that the key players have been dining on for decades, we really know very little about Superman Lives.
The wild story, sweeping changes to conventional lore, and the insistence of producer Jon Peters that a huge mechanical spider appear in the third act have long since become legendary, but would-be Kal-El Nicolas Cage has given fans some fascinating new information about the abandoned blockbuster.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, the actor reveals that he was the one who persuaded Tim Burton to take on the project and not the opposite.
“I have to be careful what I say about this stuff. What is it about comic books that [everything] just goes everywhere exponentially within split seconds? What I want to go on record with is: Tim Burton did not cast me. I cast Tim Burton. They wanted Renny Harlin, and he’s a nice guy and perfectly capable. But for me, the vision I had for Kal-El was more of a Tim Burton-style presentation universe.
I was a big fan of Mars Attacks! The studio was worried about Mars Attacks! But they hired Tim per my request, and then they shut the whole thing down. That’s always been both a positive and a negative to me. It’s a positive in that it left the character, and what Tim and I might have gotten up to, in the realm of imagination — which is always more powerful than that is concrete. And a negative in that I think it would have been special. Is there a chance? Who knows. I don’t know. To answer your question, I don’t know.
Even if the live-action Superman ship had sailed for good, Cage got to voice Superman in Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, so it was at least partially scratched.