At this stage, everybody knows that Nicolas Cage is a massive Superman fan, and he’ll no doubt always rue the day the chance to play the Man of Steel slipped through his fingers. Indeed, the actor once owned the Holy Grail of comic books by splashing out $150,000 to purchase Action Comics #1 before selling it almost fifteen years later for over $2 million, while he also named his second son Kal-El.
The 57 year-old may have finally gotten to scratch that particular itch somewhat when he got to voice the Big Blue Boy Scout in Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, but Tim Burton’s Superman Lives will endure forever as one of the most famous films never made. Warner Bros. funnelled $40 million into pre-production before canceling the project entirely, with Cage compensated to the tune of $20 million thanks to his pay-or-play contract with the studio, which isn’t a bad payday for what amounted to a few costume fittings.
Now, the latest deepfake has come along to imagine how the Academy Award winner and human meme generator would have looked as the star of Superman Returns, and it would be an understatement to say that the results are absolutely terrifying. Some of these deepfakes actually turn out pretty good, like Sean Connery as Gandalf or Mahershala Ali replacing Wesley Snipes in Blade, but this one definitely occupies the same territory as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in Step Brothers.
In fact, if Superman Lives had looked anything like this, then it would have been the stuff of nightmares, and seeing Nicolas Cage as the Son of Krypton in a live-action environment is going to be burned into your retinas for a long time to come.
