Henry Cavill was slated to play Superman long before he bagged the role in 2013’s Man of Steel.
Back in the early 2000s, the Dawn of Justice star was set to star as Clark Kent in a now-shelved film titled Superman: Flyby, a controversial project which was written by popular filmmaker and composer J.J. Abrams before it got canceled. The movie’s script faced immense backlash, besides an inflated budget and hindrances in production, all of which culminated in Flyby‘s demise.
However, as the saying goes, everything happens for a reason. So, while one opportunity got snatched away from Cavill, another one worth $668 million presented itself right in front of him, albeit, years later the Superman: Flyby fiasco.
Henry Cavill Almost Starred in J.J. Abram’s Cancelled Superman Film
Before Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel made a fortune at the box office and became a global hit, Henry Cavill was fully prepared to appear as Superman in Superman: Flyby. According to reports, Cavill, 39, was not only selected to portray Clark Kent on the big screen in the movie but he’d even shot a handful of scenes for the same. What’s more, the film was apparently also supposed to star MCU star Robert Downey Jr. opposite Cavill as the renowned supervillain, Lex Luthor. But the movie died down before it ever even truly began.
The major reason why Flyby met the horrid fate of being mothballed was due to its problematic script which AICN rebuked so brutally in 2002 that Abrams was left with no other choice but to kill the project. “You’ll believe a franchise can suck!”, that’s how harsh AICN’s reviews had been.
Coming to the writing part of the film, Abrams had taken certain controversial liberties concerning the superhero’s mythology wherein he refurbished quite a lot of content to present an entirely different take on Superman. And while that might’ve been a contentious decision on his part, it certainly was intriguing at best.
J.J. Abrams Revealed Some Details From Flyby‘s Script
In an old interview with Empire, the Star Trek director shed light on certain aspects regarding the script of his shelved Superman film. While he didn’t dish out the more precarious tidbits from the movie, Abrams did explain his vision behind Superman’s death and incarnation and how he’d retooled just the right amount of content from the mythology to lay the foundation for Flyby’s seemingly unique premise. Yeah, he’d been planning on killing the hero.
“The thing that I tried to emphasize in the story was that if the Kents found this boy, Kal-El, who had the power that he did, he would have most likely killed them both in short order. And the idea that these parents would see – if they were lucky to survive long enough – that they had to immediately begin teaching this kid to limit himself and to not be so fast, not be so strong, not be so powerful.”
The Mission: Impossible III director further explained how the psychological repercussions of that would comprise feelings of mortification, “self-doubt” along with “fear of oneself.”
“Extrapolating that to adulthood became a fascinating psychological profile of someone who was not pretending to be Clark Kent, but who was Clark Kent. Who had become that kind of a character who is not able or willing to accept who he was and what his destiny was…The idea in the movie was that he became Superman because he realized he had to finally own his strength and what he’d always been.”
Safe to say, Abrams had ‘a deeply troubled Superman tormented by his own demons’ kind of scenario in mind while writing the script.
Man of Steel can be streamed on Netflix.
Source: Slash Film
