Kevin Smith Would Love To See ‘Superman Lives’ Emerge As An Animated Film

Even 20 years later, the aborted Kevin Smith penned Superman Lives film continues to be the stuff of fandom legend. In one of Smith’s recent Facebook Q&A sessions, he was asked what he would think of the idea of bringing his script to life in an animated feature form:

Oh like based on my script, based on the Superman Lives script? That would be tight, dude. I’m not going to lie, that would be fun to see. That’s something I worked on 20 years ago at this point, so that would be really amazing to kind of see, like they turn it into a cartoon and get the people to do the voices. Nic Cage is still around and stuff. And I wanted Michael Rooker for my Lex Luthor, so that would be amazing. Um, but, you know, I’m game. That ain’t up to me, kids. That’s up to the good folks at Warner Bros. and stuff, but if they were ever to call and say hey, we want to do a cartoon version of that Superman script we wrote, believe me I’d be like, that’d be dope, man. You know you close all loops in life, one way or another, and that would be a nice way to close that loop.

To get to see one of the biggest Superman fanboys finally get to turn his vision loose would be as he said, dope. By this point the idea of seeing The Walking Dead’s Merle Dixon (Michael Rooker) as Lex Luthor isn’t as out there as it might once have been. I mean, we’ve had to endure Roger Dodger’s Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) as Lex in Batman v. Superman, so how more off the character path could it really be?

Presumably what Smith means is that he’d be hip to see his script become a film as written, without the studio interference that was being brought in by producer Jon Peters (such as making the suit all-blank, or having one of the big battles be against a giant spider) before the project was scuttled. The director that had been attached to the original project was Tim Burton, who was just coming off of his successful Mars Attacks! To be fair, while Mars was a good film, Burton had also just come off of Batman Forever, so there’s no telling if he would have kept Superman Lives heading in that downward nose-dive which he had his Batman films in.

The DCEU has its roadmap already established in front of itself, but animated side projects (like the recent Batman: The Killing Joke) do allow for a somewhat unique opportunity to create one-offs that don’t have to gel into the regular live-action continuity or even canon. All it would take would be for Warner Bros to decide to give it a green light and we know at least Smith would be on board.