It’s claimed that the Nicolas Cage Superman is a big cameo appearing in The Flash movie as part of the DC Multiverse.
Nicolas Cage was set to play the Man of Steel in the canceled Tim Burton movie being developed around 1996 with a previous script from Kevin Smith.
The actor screen-tested for the role and even tried on the suit but WB passed citing budget issues.
The good news is that, assuming the rumor is true, the Nicolas Cage Superman is now canon.
According to Giant Freakin Robot, Ezra Miller’s The Flash spots Nicolas Cage as Superman fighting a giant mechanical monster, an obvious nod and reference to the Tim Burton movie that never happened which was supposed to feature similar scenes.
It’s also been said WB held the final test screening recently so it appears this may have leaked from there.
Interestingly enough, in a GQ Q&A from last year, a fan asked why Superman Lives can’t still be made today.
Cage replied, “Would it matter how much time I appeared as the character? There might still be a chance.”
It’s also known they tried bringing the actor as Superman in the Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover on The CW.
“We did reach out to Nic Cage,” producer and co-writer Marc Guggenheim revealed during an interview with Indiewire. “We reached out to a lot of people, and there were people who didn’t want to do it. There were people who would only do it for amounts of money that we could not ever afford. And there were other people who really wanted to do it, but couldn’t for scheduling. That was the case with a lot of, I have to say, the movie stars that we reached out to. The thing about movie stars is, they’re all shooting movies. And unless those movies are shooting in Vancouver, we’re kind of out of luck. But I have to say that the sheer number of actors that we did end up getting exceeded my expectation.”
