It’s been a lifelong dream of Nicolas Cage to play Superman in a live-action movie, with the actor easily the Man of Steel’s most famous fan in all of Hollywood.
A quarter of a century after Tim Burton’s Superman Lives fell apart, he finally got the chance to make it a reality… well, kind of. The Academy Award winner may have been actively present and in-costume to shoot his cameo appearance in The Flash, but it came as part of the haunting Chronobowl sequence that dwelled firmly within the uncanny valley.
Tim Burton was horrified by its very existence, and while speaking to Yahoo!, Cage echoed those sentiments on the dangers of AI, but not not before admitting that what ended up onscreen was hardly reflective of what he actually contributed in his physical form.
“First and foremost, I was on set. 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. I had no dialogue [so had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that’s what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours. When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did. I don’t think it was [created by] AI. I know Tim 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. … But I get where Tim’s coming from. I know what he means. I would be very unhappy if people were taking my art … and appropriating them. I get it. I mean, I’m with him in that regard. AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane. You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence.”
It doesn’t sound as though Cage regrets showing up in The Flash regardless of the end product hardly being a true representation of what he actually did, but that doesn’t make it any less nightmarish.