Nic Cage’s infamously bad CGI cameo in The Flash was a poorly handled, unsurprising mess of an attempt to cash in on a film that was never made, but it could have been much different.
According to a Yahoo interview with Cage himself, the actor was indeed on set to film the cameo but what he shot was not what showed up on screen.
“First and foremost, I was on set,” Cage explained. “They did put a lot of time into building the suit … 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. 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. 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,” he continued. “That was not what I did. 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 … it’s out of my control. I literally went to shoot a scene for maybe an hour in the suit, looking at the destruction of a universe and trying to convey the feelings of loss and sadness and terror in my eyes. That’s all I did.”
Basically, that scene wasn’t what Cage did at all with the filmmakers instead making it a joke that featured the giant spider that was one of producer Jon Peter’s ridiculous ideas for Cage’s Superman movie (as relayed by Kevin Smith). At one point Cage’s Superman does stare in horror at the end of the universe but, ironically, a chunk of his cameo has his eyes glowing red as he shoots lasers out of them, meaning all the eye acting Cage worked to do is hidden.
Of course, the bad CGI and complete redoing of whatever Cage had shot in his fancy remade Superman costume wasn’t the only issue with the moment. It was also entirely spoiled by WB and director Andy Muschetti revealing the cameo ahead of time in a desperate bid to get people to see the film, which was floundering before it even came out. The end result, of course, was a mess of a film that no one saw and began the slow, painful death of the DCEU before James Gunn actually takes over.
