After I was however a humble Warner Bros. Studio tour information in 2012, your complete division was gifted a uncommon deal with: A visit to the studio archives. Shuttled to a nondescript airport hangar, we toured probably the most treasured of WB artifacts, an elite few of which rotate on show on the lot’s museum.
The constructing resembled the warehouse on the finish of “Raiders of the Misplaced Ark,” with rows and rows of boxed and filed treasures. My eyes darted furiously as if trying to find the covenant. Drawers have been labeled with legendary names: “Bette Davis” and “Errol Flynn.” A refrigerated room held a trove of “Gremlins.” We have been advised a bundle of partitions was Monica’s house from “Pals.” A room was devoted simply to automobiles (“image automobiles”), from Batmobiles to the Argo vessel — no, not that “Argo” — the one from the 1979 Jack the Ripper time journey journey “Time After Time.”
Essentially the most intriguing merchandise was stored in a crate, which to our luck was open, with its contents standing tall. On a model was a barely worn pink and blue outfit, innovative in that ’90s punk type. Our information knowledgeable us that it was prototype Nicolas Cage go well with from the 1998 Tim Burton “Superman Lives” film… a movie, after all, that by no means occurred.
A number of years later in 2015, I had an opportunity to see a screening of “The Loss of life of Superman Lives: What Occurred?” on the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. This glorious documentary, directed by the late Jon Schnepp, was a real fan expertise — not that I’m a rabid fan, however when one thing is made with the sort of love that specific doc was, it’s robust to not catch the passion.
It’s a film about an aborted film that’s price revisiting, or visiting for the primary time, and it’s presently out there on YouTube. By means of idea artwork, exhaustive interviews with the entire main gamers (minus Cage, however together with Burton, costume designer Colleen Atwood, and the primary draft script author Kevin Smith), and behind-the-scenes check footage, Schnepp was capable of craft a fairly stellar illustration of what a Burton-directed Superman might need felt like. On the finish, too, it manages to make even probably the most skeptical of viewers go, “Properly… possibly…” because it flashes a quite placing picture of Cage in what’s (I imagine) the go well with I noticed withering contained in the archives. His final costume exams, by the best way, have been shot the day they pulled the plug on the film. It was that near getting into entrance of the cameras.
Cage would ultimately have a really fast cameo as one in every of a multiverse of Supermen in 2023’s “The Flash.” In a later interview, he mentioned he solely spent three hours on set for that movie, starring Ezra Miller because the title character. “After I went to [see] the image, it was me combating a large spider. I didn’t try this. That was not what I did,” he defined to Yahoo! Leisure. “I don’t assume it was [created by] AI. I do know Tim [Burton] is upset about AI, as I’m. It was CGI, OK, in order that they might de-age me, and I’m combating a spider. I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what occurred there.”
Burton has by no means had an opportunity to even briefly revisit the character, one thing he mentioned he had regrets over in a 2023 BFI interview. “Whenever you work that lengthy on a venture and it doesn’t occur, it impacts you for the remainder of your life,” he mentioned. “Since you get enthusiastic about issues, and every factor is an unknown journey, and it wasn’t there but. But it surely’s a type of experiences that by no means leaves you, just a little bit.”
Whereas I can not relate the behind-the-scenes drama to the extent that “The Loss of life of Superman Lives” is in a position, suffice to say that anybody curious sufficient to observe or do a deep dive on the varied scripts and smattering of artifacts that stay from the manufacturing (one idea even ended up within the film “Wild Wild West“) will stroll away with a robust impression — notably of producer Jon Peters, who would ultimately wind up producing “Superman Returns.”
Among the many would-be movie’s stranger features — or at the very least issues that sound unusual looking back — are big Brainiac spiders, proposed “Superman” basketball shorts, and a power-regenerating go well with. Not all of this might’ve occurred, however geez wouldn’t it have been one thing.
I couldn’t take images on the fateful day I noticed the Nicolas Cage go well with, however it lives on in my reminiscence. And by some means that reminiscence — faint and vague — would possibly surpass something Tim Burton might need been capable of craft.
Take a watch of the doc you probably have some free time.
