Of all the cameos in Andy Muschietti‘s “The Flash” (and there were a lot of them), Nic Cage‘s brief appearance as Superman easily soars to the top of the list. But EW reports (via Yahoo Entertainment) that according to the actor, what the audience sees of his Kal-El onscreen isn’t what he did on set. Far from it, in fact.
In “The Flash,” Cage cameos as the iconic superhero he was going to play in the ’90s for Tim Burton for “Superman Lives“ before Warner Bros. scrapped the project. One of the plans for that movie that never was? Apparently producer Jon Peters wanted Cage’s Superman to fight a giant space spider in Burton’s film. And that’s what Cage’s superhero briefly does in “The Flash,” except that’s not what the actor filmed when he dropped by Muschietti’s set. “When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that,” Cage told Yahoo. “That was not what I did.”
“I think [Muschietti] is a terrific director, he is a great guy and a great director, and I loved his two “It” movies,” Cage continued. “What I was supposed to do was literally just be standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and 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. I had no dialogue [so I had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that’s what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours.”
Muschietti and Warner Bros. obviously went in a different direction, altering their footage of Cage to create the Superman-space spider faceoff digitally. But that also means digitally recreating Cage’s Superman using VFX and AI tools, something Burton spoke out against earlier this Fall. Cage agrees with the director’s criticisms, but he also think what happened on “The Flash” is a little more complicated than AI trickery.
“I get where Tim’s coming from. I know what he means. I would be very unhappy if people were taking my art,” Cage said about Warner Bros. co-opting Burton’s ideas and iconography as their own. “I’m with him in that regard. AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane. You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence. But I don’t think it [was] AI [in “The Flash”]. I just think that they did something with it, and again, it’s out of my control.”
In any case, Cage’s Kal-El did manage to make it onto the big screen decades after Burton attempted to. Was it worth it? “The Flash” got mixed reviews from critics, the latest in a long line of DCEU films met with a tepid shrug by audiences and journalists alike. But that likely won’t be the case for Cage’s next time on screen: “Dream Scenario,” fresh off a buzzy world premiere at TIFF and ready to hit theaters next Friday, November 10. Cage has already received some of the highest praise of his career for his performance in Kristoffer Borgli‘s sophomore feature; a digitally enhanced Kal-El can’t say that…