Back in the late '90s, Warner Bros. was working on another Superman movie that was to be directed by Tim Burton off a script written by none other than Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats). To make things that much stranger, their Man of Steel at the time was a long-haired Nicolas Cage, and the film – titled Superman Lives -- revolved around the 1992 Death of Superman comic storyline in which Superman battled the villainous Doomsday till each of them perished.
At the time, the film was so far along that various screen tests had been conducted and it had been given a release date of July 4th 1998. However, a ballooning budget – coupled with the box office failure of Batman & Robin – forced the studio to scrap the entire thing. Eight years later, the story was re-tooled and re-casted (with the relatively unknown Brandon Routh playing Superman) for Bryan Singer's Superman Returns.
Till this day folks are still quite transfixed by the Superman project that almost was – so much so that there's all sorts of hoopla online today over an image TimBurton.jp claims is a screen test of Nicolas Cage in the Superman costume. Some think it's an obvious fake, with Cage's head photoshopped onto the body of an action figure, though others believe this might, in fact, be a photo of the Superman we almost (but thankfully did not) witness on the big screen.
What do you think – is this image of Nic Cage real or fake?
