In case you didn’t know, at one point in the 90’s, Nicolas Cage was cast as Superman in a film called Superman Lives. The movie was set to be directed by Tim Burton and costumes and sets were designed (to the tune of $50 million) but ultimately, the project never happened.
You read that correctly, $50 million was spent on a movie that NEVER even happened.
The first draft of the script was actually written by Kevin Smith (who has gone into very interesting detail about how he got the job in the first place) but was ultimately scrapped by Tim Burton.
Smith was recently asked in a Facebook Q & A if he’d be interested in seeing the script brought to life in Animated form, and he seemed very open to the idea:
“Oh like based on my script, based on the Superman Lives script? That would be tight dude. I’m not going to lie, that would be fun to see. That’s something I worked on 20 years ago at this point, so that would be really amazing to kind of see, like they turn it into a cartoon and get the people to do the voices. Nic Cage is still around and stuff. And I wanted Michael Rooker for my Lex Luthor so that would be amazing. Um, but, you know, I’m game. That ain’t up to me kids. THat’s up to the good folks at Warner Bros. and stuff, but if they were ever to call and say hey we want to do a cartoon version of that Superman script we wrote, believe me I’d be like (melts), that’d be dope man. You know you close all loops in life, one way or another, and that would be a nice way to close that loop.”
The film was actually featured in a documentary titled The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? in which director Jon Scnepp goes into great detail about the project and what it could have been.
What do you think of this? Are you sad we didn’t get to see Nicolas Cage as Superman? Would you like to see an animated version of this? Tell us in the comment section below!