Nicolas Cage Says His Lost Superman Movie Would've Been The Best

Nicolas Cage believes there's only one true Superman movie, and it never got made.

Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival (via Entertainment Weekly), Cage said Superman Lives, the movie that director Tim Burton cast him for in the '90s, would've been better than Bryan Singer's Superman Returns and Zack Snyder's Man of Steel.

"I would offer that the movie that Tim and I would have made, in your imagination, is more powerful than any of the Superman movies," he said. "I didn't even have to make the movie and we all know what that movie would have been in your imagination. That is the Superman. That is the movie. Even though you never saw it, it is the Superman."

The movie, which never got off the ground, has been a source of fascination for decades. A screen test of Cage in costume (below) found life online and a documentary called The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? was released in 2015.

Back in 2013, Burton spoke about the movie to Huffington Post. "It was like Batman all those years ago; there was always a bit of controversy. Like, 'Oh, it's too dark.' It's like, well, now it looks like a light-hearted romp. We were trying to explore the more human side of the character and get into that whole thing."

In 2015, Cage told Yahoo! that he wished the film had been made, but he's also happy that it didn't. "I would've loved to have seen it," he said. "But I feel that in many ways, it was sort of a win-win because of the power of the imagination. I think people can actually see the movie in their minds now and imagine it and in many ways that might resonate more deeply than the finished project."

Find out the real reasons Superman Lives was never made.