As many of you are no doubt aware, Tim Burton was set to foll0w-up his two Batman movies in the mid-90s with a reboot of the Superman franchise entitled Superman Lives, which would have seen Nicolas Cage starring as the Man of Steel. Burton spent several years – and a fortune of Warner Bros.’ money – developing the movie before it was abandoned, and now screenwriter Dan Gilroy has spoken about his work on the project during a promotional interview for his directorial debut Nightcrawler.
“I spent a year working with Tim Burton on his Superman Lives movie and the day they pulled the plug on that was very, very disappointing. It was disappointing for all of us: for me, for Tim, for Nic Cage, for Jon Peters. We were very far along and Warner Bros. had gone through a cycle where nothing they were making was connecting and they were hemorrhaging money and they just didn’t feel that they could sustain making that film. So that was a major disappointment. I think Tim would have made a really marvelous film out of what we had come up with. That was hard.”
As for Burton’s take on the Man of Steel, Gilroy stated that: “Tim had the idea, which was really the driving force of the movie, that Jor-El didn’t have the chance to tell Kal-El when he put him in the little spaceship meteorite where he came from or who he was. So poor little Kal-El grew up on Earth having no idea where these powers came from or who he was, and I always thought that was a really inverted, deconstructionist element to bring to the story. I loved it and working with Tim we tried to explore it as much as possible. I’d love to see it happen some day. I’m a big Tim Burton fan.”
While we’ll never get a chance to see how Superman Lives would have turned out, filmmaker Jon Schnepp is busy puttinng the finishing touches to the documentary The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?, which will give us some insight into one of the most infamous chapters in comic book movie history.
Originally published October 25, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
