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Tim Burton was not a fan of Nicolas Cage’s Superman cameo in “The Flash”.
The DC and Warner Bros. film — released back in June — featured a variety of cameo appearances from plenty of famous faces; however, Cage’s unexpected cameo stood out the most compared to those of Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton and George Clooney, who all appeared separately as Bruce Wayne/Batman in the film, reprising their former takes on the superhero.
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Burton — who directed Keaton as Batman in 1989’s “Batman” and its 1992 sequel “Batman Returns” — was previously set to direct Cage, 59, as Superman in “Superman Lives” in the late ’90s, following the success of his “Batman” franchise at Warner Bros. However, the project was axed after pre-production went on for an extensive two-year period.
In a recent interview, the filmmaker and animator reacted to Cage’s Superman cameo and Keaton’s Batman return in “The Flash”, to which he harshly compared them to the current trend of using AI technology to reimagine films and characters.
While in conversation with the British Film Institute, Burton, 65, emphasized that he definitely wasn’t impressed with the project decision to “misappropriate” both of his interpretations of the two characters, particularly Cage’s Superman, which he argued was almost a total CGI creation that felt completely artificial.
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“But also it goes into another AI thing, and this is why I think I’m over it with the studio. They can take what you did, Batman or whatever, and culturally misappropriate it, or whatever you want to call it,” he explained. “Even though you’re a slave of Disney or Warner Brothers, they can do whatever they want. So in my latter years of life, I’m in quiet revolt against all this.”
Elsewhere, Burton revealed that, today, he has no remorse over the missed opportunity to helm his own film about the Man of Steel, despite admitting at the time that the scrapped film was a painful loss.
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“No, I don’t have regrets,” he told the BFI. “I will say this: when you work that long on a project and it doesn’t happen, it affects you for the rest of your life. Because you get passionate about things, and each thing is an unknown journey, and it wasn’t there yet. But it’s one of those experiences that never leaves you, a little bit.”
