Ron Seifried | On 24, Jul 2014

A cancelled project that once included writer Kevin Smith, director Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage as ….Superman, is finally having its story told. The first full trailer for The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? a Kickstarter project last year, has been uploaded and it includes interviews with nearly all the participants (except for Cage), but you get to see the unlikely hero in the Superman outfit.

Over 2000 backers raised over $115,000 for Jon Schnepp’s Kickstarter project, which apparently did not include microphones for the interview segments. Leave out the fact that director Schnepp feels he needs to be in most of the interview shots and the overall poor lighting, this still looks to be an interesting documentary on a failed film production.

 

 

The story begins with Kevin Smith, hot off his success of Clerks, pitching the idea to producer Jon Peters for a new take on Superman. All Peters wanted was for the outfit to be an all-black suit and for Superman not to fly. Somehow Smith convinced him otherwise, and the story plotted along with a giant spider as the main villain in a climatic showdown. Other baddies in the script included at one time, Brainiac fighting polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude, and a dog for Lex Luthor. Most of these ideas were eventually tossed, some ending up in Peter’s later flop Wild Wild West.

Smith changed Peters nutty ideas with a more traditional approach: having Brainiac sending Doomsday to kill Superman, with a supergroup of villains including Lex Luthor. Superman is somehow resurrected by a Kryptonian robot called the Eradicator, and is eventually able to defeat all of the henchman.

The casting ideas were wide, including Ben Affleck as the title character, Linda Fiorentino as Lois Lane, Jack Nicholson as Lex Luthor and Smith buddies Jason Lee as Brainiac and Jason Mewes as Jimmy Olsen. After many casting and director changes, Tim Burton was hired to lead the production. He then brought in Wesley Strick to rewrites Smith’s script, best know at the time as the writer for Martin Scorese’s remake of Cape Fear.

Smith was very disappointed in the change, saying at the time: “The studio was happy with what I was doing. Then Tim Burton got involved, and when he signed his pay-or-play deal, he turned around and said he wanted to do his version of Superman. So who is Warner Bros. going back to? The guy who made Clerks or the guy who made them half a billion dollars on Batman?”

After reading Smith’s script, Strick compared it to an episode of The Simpsons. He later changed his tune after reading The Death and Return of Superman, getting a clearer picture on what Smith was trying to accomplish.

What reads like a bad plot device from Superman III (were there any good ones) the new script included Brainiac and Lex Luthor combining as one as a “schizo/scary mega-villain.” Superman is later resurrected by the power of ‘K’, a natural force representing the spirit of Krypton.

Warner Bros. felt Strick’s script was too expensive, hired Dan Gilroy to rewrite, but after two more drafts, screen test with Cage and some of the sets built on location in Pittsburgh, Burton left the project to direct Sleepy Hollow. Burton essentially wasted a year on the production for a producer (Peters) he did not work on. By this point, $30 million was spent and not one frame was shot.

A couple of more years, several big name directors and actors were offered jobs, all of whom rejected the project. Finally by 2000 the project was officially dead.