Kevin Smith Confirms Strange Adventures is Dead, Reveals His Bizarro Story for the Show

During Hollywood Babble-On with co-host Ralph Garman, indie film icon Kevin Smith confirmed that the Strange Adventures anthology series originally planned for release on HBO Max is officially dead. That part is not exactly surprising, considering fans had not heard anything about the Greg Berlanti-produced show in quite a while. What’s a little more surprising is that Smith shared some pretty specific details of a story he was writing with Supergirl scribe Eric Carrasco. The story, which would have centered on Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and Bizarro, was a story in which Superman himself was not featured.

Smith revealed the cancellation as part of a broader geek news segment in which he spoke about this week’s cancellation of projects like Batgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt. Along the way, he suggested that the casting he had considered for the short was Nicolas Cage.

You can see Smith’s comments below.

Cage, of course, was at one point cast as Superman in a film called Superman Lives!, which would have been directed by Batman‘s Tim Burton. Smith wrote a screenplay for the movie, although it is not clear how much of his material would made it through to the final script. 

In 2019, Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim reached out to Cage, to offer him a cameo appearance in the multiverse-spanning Crisis on Infinite Earths TV event. Cage declined due to scheduling conflicts, although the event did end up including both Tom Welling’s Clark Kent from Smallville and Brandon Routh’s Superman from Superman Returns. 

“Both of these original DC properties we’ll be creating for HBO Max will be unlike anything seen on television,” Berlanti said of Strange Adventures and the Green Lantern show when the two were announced. “An anthology series of cautionary tales set in a world where superpowers exist, and, in what promises to be our biggest DC show ever made, we will be going to space with a Green Lantern television series, but I can’t reveal any more about that just yet.”

There has been no official word yet on Green Lantern, but most fans assume it will be another casualty of the Warner Bros. Discovery regime. Smith agrees, but cautioned listeners that he had no inside information and was just going on gut feeling. Smith likely torpedoed any chances he has of working with WBD in the near future, joining the chorus of voices that decried Warner Bros. Discovery and CEO David Zaslav’s apparent disdain for HBO Max and blasting the company for axing projects that were already in post-production.

“Time was in this business — look, you make art for somebody else, they pay for it, they’re entitled to do what they want with it,” Smith said. “That being said, there was a time when the worst thing a director had to worry about is, ‘Oh, maybe they don’t take it theatrical. Maybe it goes straight to video.’ Now they’ve just added a new fear to the mix, which is, ‘Maybe we won’t release it at all — and ever.’”