Call It a Comeback! Are Nicolas Cage's Days in the Direct-to-Streaming Wilderness Behind Him?
When you devote years of your life to exploring every film a famously prolific movie star has made over the course of a four decade-plus long career, you come to feel pretty damn invested in them.
Consequently when John Travolta delivered a delightful comic turn in the clever Quibi action movie parody Die Hart I felt proud of him the way I would a family member who’d done something impressive.
Unfortunately Die Hart was Travolta’s first success in quite a while. It was nice seeing him succeed but it does not seem to have done much for his career. The only upcoming film on Travolta’s IMDB page is for Paradise City, a direct-to-streaming crime drama costarring, you guessed it, Bruce Willis.
There was a time when Travolta and Willis reuniting after Pulp Fiction, Look Who’s Talking and, to a much lesser degree, Look Who’s Talking Now, would be a big deal. Now it’s just sad. I’ll watch Paradise City, of course, but out of a grudging sense of obligation rather than excitement.
The future looks much brighter for Travolta’s Face/Off costar Nicolas Cage in no small part because his present is pretty damn auspicious.
Cage delivered remarkable lead performances over the past decade in cult movies like 2013’s Joe, 2017’s Mom and Dad, 2018’s Mandy and 2019’s Color Out of Space but he also starred in any number of interchangeable direct-to-streaming action movies during that time as well.
Over the past few years, however, Cage has mounted one hell of a comeback. Cage’s performance in 2021’s Pig won him some of the best reviews of his career and generated Oscar talk although he did not end up getting nominated.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a meta comedy where Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself, meanwhile, currently has a 100 percent approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes.
That’s good! That’s real good! In fact, it would be impossible to get a higher score! As someone who is unhealthily invested in Cage’s career I was relieved that The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is getting great reviews and enjoying tremendous buzz because that’s the kind of tricky project that could either be an Adaptation or Being John Malkovich-like postmodern marvel or a tone-deaf embarrassment.
A TV mini-series that would have cast Cage as Joe Exotic was quietly cancelled, which is probably for the best. We as a culture are understandably tired of Exotic and his antics and certainly do not need two separate narrative takes on the material. While Cage’s Exotic project was cancelled, Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell did end up playing the flamboyant showman opposite Kate McKinnon’s Carole Baskin in Joe Vs. Carole.
Cage will be playing Dracula in The Lego Movie’s Chris McKay’s Renfield and possibly follow that up with sequels to National Treasure: Book of Secrets and Face/Off.
When Cage expressed a desire to play Egghead in a sequel to The Batman it inspired excitement and anticipation instead of people cynically lamenting that of course someone whose movies have consistently gone direct-to-streaming would want a big role in a sure-fire blockbuster.
Are Cage’s days of prostituting his massive talent for cheap, easy, direct-to-streaming paydays over? God I hope so. Cage has spent an awful long time in the creative and professional wilderness but hopefully in the years and decades ahead he’ll be treated the legend he is and not a mercenary has been whose best days are behind him.
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