The First Time We Saw Nicolas Cage In A Superman Suit
Superman used to have no place here on Giant Freakin’ Robot, even though he is an alien, and Bizarro Superman was spectacular. So that’s why this story isn’t about Zack Snyder or Man of Steel or the Justice League movie.
We have our own summer blockbusters with hyper-contextualized sub-information to obsess over. However, this involves Nicolas Cage, a person upon whom science fiction often seems to be entirely based. And when this happened, there was cause for moderate freakout.
That’s because this was the first time we actually saw what Nicolas Cage would have looked like as Superman.
This is the first shot of Cage in the previously unseen test suit from the iller-than-ill-fated Superman Lives from the mid-’90s.
Nicolas Cage was reportedly a longtime comic book fan, and his casting as Superman certainly generated considerable buzz. Heck, this was going to be a pretty unique take on the iconic character.
He even did costume tests and screen tests for the role (as seen above), but the film ultimately fell apart due to creative differences, budgetary concerns, and the studio’s lack of confidence in the unconventional direction it was taking under Burton’s vision
It’s one of those rare non-films that took on a life of its own due to the increasingly bizarre parameters that producer Jon Peters was insisting screenwriter Kevin Smith add to the script.
Big spiders. No flying. Brainiac fights a bear. Even a little Lex Luthor thrown in. It seemed like the Nicolas Cage Superman movie was going to be all over the place. And possibly, nowhere good. It was all for naught, but this has got to be the best bit of pre-production material from this flick yet.
Comic book movies certainly went a different way after this, but seeing Nicolas Cage as Superman would have changed the landscape considerably, possibly even for good. Would it have been a totally different look? Of course. That’s the way these things always go. I think it turned out okay in the end, though there were some who clearly didn’t love the Henry Cavill version of the character, or Brandon Routh for that matter either. Heck, at least we got Tom Welling’s version on the small screen.
But Nicolas Cage’s not playing Superman certainly represents one of the true Hollywood sliding doors moments. He went on to make an appearance in The Flash movie when they were making their own ridiculous run through the ill-fated DC Multiverse. But he was mostly just standing there, not too dissimilar to what we saw above.
