It was a long road to get Nicolas Cage on the big screen as Superman before he finally made a cameo as the Man of Steel in Andy Muschietti's largely maligned superhero film, The Flash. But it doesn't sound as though the 59-year-old actor was impressed by the finished product.
For some backstory: Cage was at one time supposed to star in Tim Burton's Superman reimagining Superman Lives, which was ultimately scrapped by Warner Bros. in 1998 amid creative differences between Burton, producer Jon Peters, and Kevin Smith, who penned the script with Ben Affleck in mind. Affleck, of course, would go on to appear as Batman in Zack Snyder's DC Extended Universe.
However, given the multiverse plot line in The Flash, which saw both Affleck and Michael Keaton reprise their roles as Batman, Muschietti wanted to give Cage the chance to finally play the character.
But as Cage recalled in an interview with Yahoo! this week while promoting his new film Dream Scenario, the finished product was not at all what he expected.
“First and foremost, I was on set," Cage deadpanned. And while he had high praise for Muschietti, coming off the two It movies, he said that his role was to "literally just be standing in an alternate dimension ... witnessing the destruction of the universe."
"Kal-El was bearing witness to the end of a universe, and you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey," Cage explained. "I had no dialogue—convey with my eyes, the emotion. So that’s what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours."
"When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that," he continued. "That was not what I did. I don’t think it was—I don't think it was AI, I know Tim [Burton] is upset about AI as I am—it was CGI, OK, so that they de-age me, and I’m fighting a spider. I didn’t do any of that. So I don’t know what happened there."
Noting Burton's issues with people appropriating drawings of Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas, Cage doubled down on his distaste for AI: "[It's] a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane. You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence."
“Well I don't think it was AI, I just think that they did something with it, and again, it’s out of my control," he added. "I literally went to shoot a scene for maybe an hour in the suit, looking at the destruction of a universe and trying to convey the feelings of loss and sadness and terror in my eyes. That’s all I did."
Oddly enough, the giant spider was a nod to Peters' vision for Superman Lives, who had a non-negotiable condition that Superman fight "a giant spider" in the third act of the film. The story of the disastrous, would-be movie was eventually outlined in the 2015 documentary, The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?
You can watch the finished product of Cage's cameo in The Flash below:
