8 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Superman For Everyone

2. Almost Everything About Superman Lives

Nicholas Cage Superman Lives
Showtime Networks

There have been a lot of famous comic book movie cancellations over the years, but none more chaotic or notorious than Superman Lives.

One of two failed Superman projects to emerge in between the release of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Superman Returns, Superman Lives (formerly Superman Reborn) was put into production in the 1990s with Tim Burton attached to direct and Nicolas Cage (who's actually a massive comic book fan, and even named his son Kal-El), in the role of the Man of Steel.

Wild Wild West Spider
Warner Bros.

The film itself was primarily inspired by the Death of Superman arc from the early 1990s (a comic Batman v Superman would also lift inspiration from), and would've seen Brainiac, Lex Luthor and Doomsday as the main villains. Several treatments of the film were developed by different writers, with one in particular, Kevin Smith, eventually leaving the project once Burton came aboard and decided he wanted greater ownership of the story.

Smith has revealed key details about Superman Lives' troubled production in the years since it fell apart, but if anything could sum up just how weird a project it was, then it would have to be producer Jon Peters' desire for Smith to insert a giant spider - among other, offensively reasoned things - into the story. This same spider would eventually show up in 1999's Wild Wild West, also produced by Peters.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.