Out of all the comic-con superhero movies, it’s hard to find one which was so bad that it was never even made. Superman Lives, the late 90’s aborted Superman film, would have been a big failure. By just looking at the images from the movie, it seems like it could have been worse than Batman and Robin movie.
There’s one photo from the pre-production of the film – a long-haired Nicolas Cage in a disastrous Superman costume that made most comic lovers feel like the Superman Lives was better off dead. But it might be a possibility that fans didn’t know the full potential the movie had?
In the mid-90s, nearly ten years since the release of the last Superman movie, Warner Bros were set to reboot the Superman film series, but in a lofty and ambitious way possible. Rather than going ahead with the foundation build by Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner.
Warner Bros wanted to turn the mythology entirely on its head. Famous comic nerd Kevin Smith was hired for the screenplay, based on Death of Superman comic series. Later on, they got Nicolas Cage on board to star as Superman and director Tim Burton, all these names were at their peaks during the 90s.
But, things went incredibly wrong, the costumes were full neon, giant spiders, and there were polar bears. Rewriters were hired to revive the script but couldn’t help much. And Eventually, the project was scrapped.
According to the director and people associated with the film, they wanted to show how alien Superman was and how to cut off the felt from humans. The spiders and bears were silly, but the movie had two of the most excellent superman villains, Brainiac and Doomsday. This movie would have deconstructed the idea of what Superman means.
Warner Brothers explained that casting Nicolas Cage was a good idea because he was at his peak during the 90s, and he had major hits and was a comic book fan himself.
There is a clip from “What Happened?” in which Nicolas Cage says, “I was gonna turn Superman character upside down, and the team of Superman Lives believed that he would have done exactly that.” Not in a bad way, but in a way, nobody would have ever imagined of. But after the movie was scrapped, Cage’s career started to decline, which movie producer Payne thinks was a shame. She added, “she doesn’t want to say that people idiots, but she would call people uninformed about Nicolas Cage”. She said Nicolas Cage is an actor who took chances and isn’t afraid of performing any role.
Final words
We don’t know whether Superman Lives would have been a good movie or not. But the film described by the people associated with it doesn’t make us feel that it was dumb – it might have won some hearts. Or maybe it would have failed because of its big ambition.
