Kick-Ass 2, which released in 2013.
Kick-Ass is the story a teen (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) with no powers or special abilities who goes out and becomes a real-life superhero. Its action is over the top, the fight scenes are very bloody, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of then 12-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz's Adam West's Batman was totally cool using heavy firearms to murder crime lords and Cage's performance perfectly captures that strange blend and is a large part of why Kick-Ass works as well as it does. Only now, it's been revealed he wasn't actually Vaughn's first pick to play the role.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Vaughn reflects on getting the first Kick-Ass movie made, saying that at the time: "No studio would touch it." He managed to bring Brad Pitt on board as a producer, having previously worked together on Guy Ritchie's Inglourious Basterds. The role of Big Daddy then went to Nicolas Cage, who Vaughn believed would understand how best to play the character given his own love of comic book superheroes.
Following the release of Kick-Ass 2, there was some discussion of a Tessa Thompson has expressed interest in playing the new Kick-Ass, though only after Vaughn shared that she'd be his pick for the live-action version of the role.
Of course, Vaughn doesn't away get his first picks, and ultimately, Cage proved to be the better choice in the end. Granted, we'll never really know how Pitt would have approached Big Daddy, but seeing as the only superhero role he's played has been his brilliant cameo as The Vanisher in Ghost Rider in two universally panned movies. As it stands, Big Daddy is by far Cage's best superhero performance, and it's strange to imagine a world in where it could have been Pitt instead.
Source: THR
