On Sunday, the biggest crossover yet in The CW’s sprawling “Arrowverse” of DC Comics-adapted shows, Crisis On Infinite Earths, begins with an episode of Supergirl. The five-episode and multi-character series continues with entries by Batwoman, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow, and characters from all five programs — as well as other, non-Arrowverse titles like Smallville and Batman: The Animated Series — will pop up. According to a jokey tweet posted by executive producer Marc Guggenheim in October, even Nicolas Cage was contacted about making a cameo.
What makes you think we didn't reach out… 😜
— Marc Guggenheim (@mguggenheim) October 1, 2019
The thing is, he wasn’t actually joking. As Guggenheim explained to IndieWire in a recent interview, his team really did reach out to Cage, who almost starred in Tim Burton’s Superman Lives. “You know, to be honest with you, because I never want to lie on these things,” he said, “I actually did … we did reach out to Nic Cage”:
“I’ll tell you one thing, we reached out to a lot of people, and there were people who didn’t want to do it. There were people who would only do it for amounts of money that we could not ever afford. And there were other people who really wanted to do it, but couldn’t for scheduling. That was the case with a lot of, I have to say, the movie stars that we reached out to. The thing about movie stars is, they’re all shooting movies. And unless those movies are shooting in Vancouver, we’re kind of out of luck.”
Whether Cage was of the “didn’t want to do it,” “would only do it for… money,” or “couldn’t for scheduling” categories remains to be seen, as Guggenheim doesn’t specify. Considering just how generous the Academy Award-winning actor can often be with his time, though, perhaps the third (and more friendly) camp isn’t too far off the mark.
And who knows? Maybe the filmmakers behind that meta film with Cage playing a version of himself will work Superman Lives, Crisis On Infinite Earths, or both into a reference or two.
(Via IndieWire)
