Nineteen million dollars.
That is how much Warner Bros. flushed down the toilet before a single frame of film was even shot for Tim Burton’s Superman reboot. It’s a legendary number in Hollywood, the kind of financial disaster that keeps studio executives awake at night. But The Death of Superman Lives isn't just a story about lost money or a giant spider. It’s a weird, messy, beautiful look at what happens when the biggest names in the industry—Tim Burton, Nicolas Cage, and Kevin Smith—try to reinvent a god.
Honestly, we almost got a movie where Superman didn't fly. We almost got a movie where he wore a light-up suit. And yeah, we almost got the giant spider.
People still talk about this project like it’s a ghost. It haunts the internet because it represents a specific era of "anything goes" filmmaking that just doesn't exist anymore in the age of calculated, safe cinematic universes. The 1990s were a chaotic time for comic book movies. Batman was a hit, Batman & Robin was a neon disaster, and Superman was stuck in development hell for the better part of a decade.
The Giant Spider in the Room: How it Started
Kevin Smith was the first one to really get the ball rolling on the script. Fresh off the success of Clerks and Mallrats, he was the ultimate geek-made-good. But he had to deal with producer Jon Peters. If you’ve seen the documentary The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? by the late Jon Schnepp, you know Peters is the primary antagonist of this saga.
Peters had three rules for Smith. Superman couldn't fly. Superman couldn't wear the suit. And, for some reason that defies all logic, Superman had to fight a giant spider in the third act.
Why a spider? Peters apparently thought they were the "fiercest killers in the insect kingdom."
Smith, being a fan, tried to make it work. He wrote a script called Superman Lives that drew heavily from the Death of Superman comic arc. He brought in Brainiac. He brought in Doomsday. He even managed to work in the "Thanagarian Snare Beast" to satisfy the spider requirement. It was a fan’s dream written under a madman’s supervision.
👉 See also: Is Heroes and Villains Legit? What You Need to Know Before Buying
When Tim Burton Met Nicolas Cage
Then Tim Burton stepped in, and things got truly bizarre.
Burton didn't care about the comics. He famously admitted he never really read them. He wanted to do what he did with Batman—take a pop culture icon and turn him into a freak. An outsider. He threw out Smith's script and brought in Wesley Strick to rewrite it.
Enter Nicolas Cage.
You’ve seen the photos. The long hair. The weary eyes. The bright blue muscle suit that looked more like an alien organism than spandex. Cage wasn't looking to play the boy scout; he wanted to play a Man of Steel who felt like he didn't belong on Earth. He wanted Kal-El to be a literal alien, someone who felt uncomfortable in his own skin until he put on the cape.
It was a brilliant, risky casting choice. It would have either been the greatest superhero performance of all time or a total train wreck. There was no middle ground.
The Suit That Lit Up
One of the most fascinating pieces of evidence from the production is the "Light-up Suit." Created by concept artist Sylvain Despretz and the special effects team, this wasn't just a costume. It was a translucent, fiber-optic masterpiece meant for the "regeneration" sequence after Superman returns from the dead.
It looked like something out of TRON.
✨ Don't miss: Jack Blocker American Idol Journey: What Most People Get Wrong
In the grainy test footage, you can see the suit pulsing with light. It was beautiful. It was also incredibly expensive and difficult to maintain on a film set. But it proved that Burton wasn't interested in a retread of the Christopher Reeve era. He wanted a sci-fi epic.
The Budgetary Axe and the Death of the Project
So, why did it die?
Warner Bros. was scared. Plain and simple.
The studio had just suffered a string of massive flops. Sphere, The Postman, and Mad City had drained the coffers. They looked at the projected $140 million budget for Superman Lives and blinked. Tim Burton was coming off Mars Attacks!, which wasn't exactly a box office juggernaut.
The studio kept asking for rewrites to lower the cost. Dan Gilroy (who later directed Nightcrawler) was brought in to do a "budget-friendly" version. But the momentum was gone. In April 1998, Warner Bros. officially put the film on "hold." Burton left to direct Sleepy Hollow. Nicolas Cage eventually moved on, though he famously kept his love for the character, even naming his son Kal-El.
The irony is that many of the ideas from The Death of Superman Lives leaked into later projects. Jon Peters finally got his giant mechanical spider in Wild Wild West. Brainiac and the "alien outsider" vibe eventually found their way into Man of Steel. But we never got the full-bore Burton/Cage fever dream.
Why the Internet Won't Let It Go
There is a specific kind of melancholy surrounding unproduced masterpieces. We imagine them to be better than anything that actually gets made because they exist only in our imaginations, fueled by grainy polaroids and leaked concept art.
🔗 Read more: Why American Beauty by the Grateful Dead is Still the Gold Standard of Americana
If it had been released in 1999, it might have changed everything. Maybe the gritty, grounded superhero era would have been replaced by a surrealist, operatic era. Or maybe it would have been so weird it killed the genre entirely for twenty years.
Lessons from the Ruin
Looking back at this train wreck offers some pretty sharp insights into the film industry:
- Executive interference is a double-edged sword. Jon Peters' weird demands gave the project its unique (if insane) flavor, but they also made it an expensive logistical nightmare.
- Star power can't save a ballooning budget. Even with one of the world's biggest actors and an A-list director, the math has to work for the studio.
- The "Uncanny Valley" of Casting. Sometimes a choice is so "right" in its "wrongness" (like Cage as Clark Kent) that it scares the people signing the checks.
Moving Forward: How to Explore This History
If you're fascinated by the wreckage of this project, there are a few concrete things you can do to see what almost was. Don't just take my word for it; the artifacts are out there.
First, track down the documentary The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?. It features rare interviews with Burton, Smith, and the concept artists. It's the most thorough post-mortem ever conducted on a film.
Second, read the Kevin Smith script. It’s easily found online in PDF form. Whether you love his style or not, the dialogue is snappy, and you can see the skeleton of a great movie buried under the studio mandates.
Finally, look at the concept art by Sylvain Despretz and Phil Saunders. It’s a masterclass in 90s speculative design. Their work on the Fortress of Solitude and Brainiac’s skull-ship is genuinely visionary.
The project is dead, but its DNA is everywhere. Every time a director tries to do something truly "out there" with a superhero, they are walking in the shadow of the giant spider that never was.