It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Nicolas Cage!
Cage revealed to Yahoo! Entertainment Wednesday that he filmed a very different cameo as the Man of Steel for DC’s “The Flash” compared to the one that made the final cut.
“First and foremost, I was on set,” Cage, 59, said, dispelling rumors that the footage of the “National Treasure” star was simply reused footage from Tim Burton’s failed 1998 film “Superman Lives.”
“What I was supposed to do was literally just be standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe.” Cage continued. “Kal-El was bearing witness [to] the end of a universe, and you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey.”
“I had no dialogue [so had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that’s what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours,” the “Moonstruck” actor added.
However, when the “Raising Arizona” star went to see the film in theaters, he was shocked to find out that the scene he had filmed had been replaced with a more action-packed sequence.
“When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider,” Cage recalled. “I did not do that. That was not what I did.”
According to Cage, he does not believe that the studio used AI to recreate him, but rather CGI.
“It was CGI, OK, so that they could de-age me, and I’m fighting a spider,” Cage continued. “I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what happened there.”
“But I don’t think it [was] AI [in ‘The Flash’]. I just think that they did something with it, and again, it’s out of my control,” the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” actor stated. “I literally went to shoot a scene for maybe an hour in the suit, looking at the destruction of a universe and trying to convey the feelings of loss and sadness and terror in my eyes. That’s all I did.”
The Post reached out to Cage and Warner Bros. for comment.
Despite AI and digital recreation being a massive rallying point for members of the SAG-AFTRA strike, the use of the terrifying technology is becoming more and more prevalent.
On Wednesday, “Avengers” star Scarlett Johansson sued the AI company Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar after the app used her face and voice in a 22-second advertisement despite the star not giving consent.
According to Variety, the now-deleted clip used a snippet of an old video featuring Johansson, 38, during a behind-the-scenes look at her film “Black Widow.”
The clip then transitions to a few AI-generated images of the actress while continuing to speak with a near identical voice to Johansson.
Johansson’s lawyer told Variety: “We do not take these things lightly. Per our usual course of action in these circumstances, we will deal with it with all legal remedies that we will have.”
In October, Tom Hanks also fell victim to AI after a promotional video of a dentist plan surfaced featuring the actor’s doppelgänger.
“Beware!!” Hanks, 67, wrote underneath a photo of his lookalike. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me.”
“I have nothing to do with it,” the “Forrest Gump” star added.
Cage is very against the use of AI too.
“AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane,” he said Wednesday. “You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence.”
