Once upon a time, a big-budget reboot of the Superman franchise was going to star Nicolas Cage. Using a script by Kevin Smith. Directed by Tim Burton.

Even though those three sentences sound like they were cooked up by someone partaking of Walter White's magic rocks, rest assured this is real. Superhero geeks know this story all too well. It's the infamous tale of how a wildly daring production was derailed by the bizarre demands of one producer (Jon Peters), whose oddball ideas kept the film floundering in development hell for years, costing Warner Bros. millions of dollars with not a single frame of footage to show for it.

The studio eventually pulled the plug, leading to an almost-20-year drought of Superman movies on the big screen. In recent years, bits and pieces of the production's artwork and screen tests have started appearing online, largely thanks to the efforts of a Kickstarted documentary called The Death of 'Superman Lives': What Happened? Director Jon Schnepp shared a video clip from the docu with the L.A. Times, and it's a doozy.

The clip (you'll have to hit the link to watch it; it's not embeddable) has a buffed-up, long-haired Nicolas Cage (who was in his mid-30s at the time) trying on what appears to be a rubber Superman suit. The details are missing, such as the S-shield and the cape, but the blue, sculpted and contoured suit gives a good idea of what Cage's superhero would have looked like.

As he poses in front of members of the production crew — including Tim Burton — Cage seems genuinely enthused about the outfit and becoming the Man of Steel, although he notes that the suit is tighter than he expected.

The Death of 'Superman Lives': What Happened? will be available beginning July 9, 2015 exclusively at its official website. The documentary will also have its own booth (#3915) at San Diego Comic-Con starting this Wednesday evening.

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