SPOILER WARNING! The following story contains spoilers about “The Flash” movie.
Fans who have seen “The Flash” movie will have seen a number of interesting cameo appearances, especially towards the end of the film. In an interview with Vanity Fair, “The Flash” director Andy Muschietti reveals that there were many others they would have liked to included, including Marlon Brando as Jor-El from 1978’s “Superman: The Movie”.
“That ‘hall of fame’ of great characters and actors… there’s so many, the list was endless. We had to choose, we had to pick,” Andy Muschietti said. Among the heartbreaking cuts. “Lynda Carter was one of them,” he said, referring to her 1970s Wonder Woman TV series. “Brando and Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero…” he added.
In the film’s climax, The Flash observes other realities within the Multiverse, including a glimpse of Christopher Reeve and George Reeves as Superman, and Helen Slater’s Supergirl.
Not only do we see past Supermen, but we also get a look at a Superman that never was in the form of Nicolas Cage’s Man of Steel from the never-made movie “Superman Lives”. Fans may recall that the scrapped film from the 1990s would have seen Cage play Superman, which would have included a fight scene with a giant spider… We finally get to see that in “The Flash”.
“Part of the idea of the multiverse is presenting these worlds as living together and real,” The Flash director Andy Muschietti told EW in an interview. “So the fact that [Superman Lives] wasn’t made, doesn’t mean that that doesn’t exist somewhere in the multiverse. That was my grease from the beginning of this.”
As for getting Cage to film the cameo scene, “He did volume-capture because we needed his performance, but in the movie, obviously Superman is younger, so we wanted to portray a Superman that is the age that Superman was in 1996, which is the year where the movie Superman Lives would have come out,” Andy Muschietti explains. “We did have to refer to digital enhancement in the aging.”
Though there was heavy CGI involved to de-age Cage for the cameo, producer Barbara Muschietti confirms, “We shot him in his suit and he looked insane. Amazing.”
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Muschietti reveals there were alternate endings considered for the film, one that included Henry Cavill as Superman.
At the time the alternate ending was conceived, Henry Cavill was filming his cameo appearance at the end of the movie “Black Adam,” and was set to be returning to play Superman in a new film. Therefore, the ending of “The Flash” was still going to be on the courthouse steps, but now Sasha Calle’s Supergirl would be joined by Cavill’s Superman.
Supergirl was retained because even though the executives were killing the development of a standalone Supergirl movie, they were open to her returning in some form and didn’t want the last image audiences saw of her to be her death at the hands of a supervillain (Michael Shannon’s General Zod).
“The Flash” is in theaters now!
So they have a CGI Christopher Reeve Superman? I’m not liking the sound of this. Why have a CGI Christopher Reeve Superman when they could’ve brought back Brandon Routh to play Superman? He played the same version of Superman that Reeve had played. This makes no sense to me and just makes me shake my head in disappointment. I think that to use a CGI Christopher Reeve Superman for this film is wrong in my opinion. Because it’s not really Christopher Reeve. This movie would’ve been better off with either footage of Christopher Reeve as Superman from one of his… Read more »
Saw (and enjoyed) the movie. I thought the (very) brief scene of Reeve and Slater together was awesome.
I completely agree. The brief scenes of George Reeves and Christopher Reeve with Helen Slater were great touches. I also enjoyed the movie. (Michael Keaton knocks it out of the park.)