Nic Cage will finally get to play Superman, 20 years after his first attempt
The actor's lifelong obsession with the character knows no leaps or bounds
After a lifelong obsession, Nicolas Cage will finally get to play Superman.
The actor, a devoted Superman fan, will voice the Man of Steel in the upcoming animated movie Teen Titans Go!, which will also feature the voice work of Will Arnett as Deathstroke, musician Halsey as Wonder Woman and rapper Lil Yachty as the Green Lantern, on top of the core cast of Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Raven and Beast Boy.
Cage is an avid comic book collector, and his obsession for Superman in particular knows no bounds. His son, born in 2005, was named Kal-el Coppola Cage, Kal-el being the Kryptonian birth name of Superman. Cage also held a rare near-mint copy of Action Comics No. 1, the 1938 comic that introduced the Man of Steel to the world. He bought the issue in 1997, of which there are only around 100 left, for $150,000 US, but sold it in 2011 for over $2 million.
Most notably, Cage was cast to play Superman on the big screen in a Tim Burton adaptation, based on a script by Kevin Smith, that was supposed to be released in 1998 to coincide with the character's 60th anniversary but was ultimately scrapped. Tentatively called Superman Lives, the project has earned cult status as fans have become obsessed with what could have been, including Superman superfan Cage himself.
"I would offer that the movie that Tim and I would have made, in your imagination, is more powerful than any of the Superman movies," Cage told a reporter on the red carpet during the Toronto International Film Festival last year. "I didn't even have to make the movie and we all know what that movie would have been in your imagination. That is the Superman. That is the movie. Even though you never saw it — it is the Superman."
The plot revolved around the death, and resurrection, of Superman, and would have included Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor and Chris Rock as Clark Kent's colleague Jimmy Olsen. After years of rewriting scripts and spending $10 million US designing concept art, including the creation of prototype costumes that you can see in the much-shared leaked footage of Cage trying them on, Warner Bros. scrapped the film. The behind-the-scenes story is all told in the crowd-funded documentary What Happened? The Death of Superman Lives, released in 2015.
"It would have been beautiful," Cage told Yahoo Movies. "Tim and I were about to get up to something really relevant."
While fans will never see Burton's vision come to life, here's hoping Cage's animated Superman cameo will give him a taste of what it feels like to leap buildings in a single bound.