When I was but a humble Warner Bros. Studio tour guide in 2012, the entire department was gifted a rare treat: A trip to the studio archives. Shuttled to a nondescript airport hangar, we toured the most precious of WB artifacts, an elite few of which rotate on display at the lot’s museum.
The building resembled the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” with rows and rows of boxed and filed treasures. My eyes darted furiously as if searching for the covenant. Drawers were labeled with legendary names: “Bette Davis” and “Errol Flynn.” A refrigerated room held a trove of “Gremlins.” We were told a bundle of walls was Monica’s apartment from “Friends.” A room was dedicated just to vehicles (“picture cars”), from Batmobiles to the Argo vessel — no, not that “Argo” — the one from the 1979 Jack the Ripper time travel adventure “Time After Time.”
The most intriguing item was kept in a crate, which to our luck was open, with its contents standing tall. On a mannequin was a slightly worn red and blue outfit, cutting edge in that ’90s punk style. Our guide informed us that it was prototype Nicolas Cage suit from the 1998 Tim Burton “Superman Lives” movie… a film, of course, that never happened.
A few years later in 2015, I had a chance to see a screening of “The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?” at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. This excellent documentary, directed by the late Jon Schnepp, was a true fan experience — not that I’m a rabid fan, but when something is made with the kind of love that particular doc was, it’s tough not to catch the enthusiasm.
It’s a movie about an aborted movie that’s worth revisiting, or visiting for the first time, and it’s currently available on YouTube. Through concept art, exhaustive interviews with all of the major players (minus Cage, but including Burton, costume designer Colleen Atwood, and the first draft script writer Kevin Smith), and behind-the-scenes test footage, Schnepp was able to craft a pretty stellar representation of what a Burton-directed Superman might have felt like. At the end, too, it manages to make even the most skeptical of viewers go, “Well… maybe…” as it flashes a rather striking photo of Cage in what is (I believe) the suit I saw withering inside the archives. His last costume tests, by the way, were shot the day they pulled the plug on the movie. It was that close to going in front of the cameras.
Cage would eventually have a very quick cameo as one of a multiverse of Supermen in 2023’s “The Flash.” In a later interview, he said he only spent three hours on set for that film, starring Ezra Miller as the title character. “When I went to [see] the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did,” he explained to Yahoo! Entertainment. “I don’t think it was [created by] AI. I know Tim [Burton] is upset about AI, as I am. It was CGI, OK, so that they could de-age me, and I’m fighting a spider. I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what happened there.”
Burton has never had a chance to even briefly revisit the character, something he said he had regrets over in a 2023 BFI interview. “When you work that long on a project and it doesn’t happen, it affects you for the rest of your life,” he said. “Because you get passionate about things, and each thing is an unknown journey, and it wasn’t there yet. But it’s one of those experiences that never leaves you, a little bit.”
While I cannot relate the behind-the-scenes drama to the extent that “The Death of Superman Lives” is able, suffice to say that anyone curious enough to watch or do a deep dive on the various scripts and smattering of artifacts that remain from the production (one concept even ended up in the movie “Wild Wild West“) will walk away with a strong impression — particularly of producer Jon Peters, who would eventually wind up producing “Superman Returns.”
Among the would-be film’s stranger aspects — or at least things that sound strange in retrospect — are giant Brainiac spiders, proposed “Superman” basketball shorts, and a power-regenerating suit. Not all of this would’ve happened, but geez would it have been something.
I could not take photos on the fateful day I saw the Nicolas Cage suit, but it lives on in my memory. And somehow that memory — faint and indistinct — might surpass anything Tim Burton might have been able to craft.
Take a watch of the doc if you have some free time.
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