We all live in perpetual regret that we will never see Tim Burton’s Superman Lives on the big screen. The closest we’ll ever get is the brief cameo Nicolas Cage had as Superman in 2023’s The Flash, but even that snippet seems to have upset the star by making some wild changes in post-production. Using a CGI version of the actor, they took what was originally a solemn moment and turned it into a giant spider laser battle.

Speaking to Yahoo! Entertainment, Cage explained that what he filmed for the movie was drastically different from what ended up on screen. “What I was supposed to do was literally just be standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe,” Cage said, adding that, contrary to the rumors that the whole cameo had been done with CGI, he spent around three hours on set to fill the sequence.

“When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that.” It isn’t clear why director Andy Muschietti decided to make such a drastic change to the actor’s brief contribution to the film. What Nicolas Cage, who is known to be a huge fan of Superman, describes sounds infinitely better than the awkward mess that ended up on our screens. “Kal-El was bearing witness [to] the end of a universe, and you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey. I had no dialogue [so had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that’s what I did.”

Perhaps Muschietti decided that a mournful, touching scene with Superman would seem out of place in the awkwardly slapstick tone of The Flash, but completely changing an actor’s contribution without telling them is a strange way to thank them for providing a cameo in your movie.

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