Nicolas Cage explains why Tim Burton’s Superman failed
The studio wanted Renny Harlin to take over the project.
A few not very pretty seconds in The Flash and then that’s all. Superman Lives could have been the project of a lifetime for Nicolas Cagebut the film Tim Burton was aborted before it could come to fruition.
A 20-year-old failure, but which still seems to be pursuing the actor, interviewed on the subject during the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia recently. According to Nicolas Cageif Superman Lives was stopped by the studio, it was because it didn’t want Burton, fearing the exorbitant cost of such a superhero film, the type that was not really profitable at the end of the 1990s:
“Tim had just made Mars Attacks!, and it was a great movie. But the studio didn’t want him and wanted Renny Harlin accomplished Superman Lives“. The Finnish filmmaker, to whom we owe some 90’s hits, such as 58 minutes to live, Cliffhanger Or Goodbye forever would therefore have been approached, but nothing was done because it was too expensive.
Nicolas Cage resumes : “I knew that to do a role as iconic as Supeman, you have to hit the nail on the head. You can’t miss it. We were very close to getting there, but the studio made a decision and stopped everything. I think that “They were afraid of the budget needed, of what it was going to cost and they were too afraid of not getting their money back.”
Superman Lives, written by Kevin Smith, was to be released in 1998, with Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, Christopher Walken as Brainiac, and potentially Sandra Bullock, Courteney Cox or Julianne Moore as Lois Lane. Ultimately, the project never saw the light of day.
