The Flash was… well, it was something, but the majority of fan discourse has been caught up in the various CG cameos found in the finale, which included Nicolas Cage as Superman.
As Nicolas Cage was once slated to star as Superman in a movie directed by Tim Burton, the cameo served as a glimpse of what could have been. But the actor told Yahoo Entertainment that most of his appearance in The Flash wasn’t at all what he had shot on set. “When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did,” Cage explained. “I don’t think it was [created by] AI. I know Tim [Burton] is upset about AI, as I am. It was CGI, OK, so that they could de-age me, and I’m fighting a spider. I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what happened there.”
The actor added that he was on set for “maybe three hours” for the scene. “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 explained. “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.” Nicolas Cage did say that he really liked The Flash director Andy Muschietti. “[Andy] is a terrific director, he is a great guy and a great director, and I loved his two It movies,” Cage said.
Unfortunately, Cage’s cameo in the movie, as well as all the others in that sequence, looked far from polished, and although Muschietti has claimed they were supposed to look like that, it leaves one wondering why they even bothered bringing in Cage to shoot at all.
Nicolas Cage will next be seen in Dream Scenario in which he plays an unremarkable professor who becomes an overnight celebrity after appearing in strangers’ dreams. The film will be released on November 10th.