The movie Nicolas Cage never got paid for making: “I haven’t been thinking about it”
There are some Nicolas Cage movies that leave you hoping he got paid Dwayne Johnson money to be involved.
How else could one explain 2020’s Jiu Jitsu, in which he played a wild caveman martial arts master, or 2006’s The Wicker Man, in which he ran around in a bear costume and screamed about bees, which raises doubts that surely mortgage-denting paycheques were involved.
Even when the films are good, though, most people naturally assume that the stars would have received some capital for their efforts. Sometimes, it’s questionable whether they’ve earned it, but that could never be said of Cage, an actor who throws himself so fully into roles that it’s impressive he’s still standing. More than four decades of shrieking and acrobatic contortions later, and he’s still averaging three or four movies a year.
If you were to hazard a guess as to which movie he never got paid for, you might think it was one of his earliest ones, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or The Outsiders, in which he was barely an extra. Or maybe, if you boast a deep reserve of Cage knowledge, you would guess that it’s 2019’s Grand Isle, which grossed only $5,566 at the box office off of a $5million budget and was exactly as bad as that makes it sound; however, the actual answer is pretty shocking, and for several reasons.
In a 2024 red carpet interview during the SXSW film festival, Cage was asked about the rumour that he never got paid for the 1995 drama Leaving Las Vegas, and he was pretty laid back in his response, saying, as far as he could remember, it was “probably true” that he’d never seen a dime for the project, but added, “I haven’t been thinking about it”, speaking like a man who can afford to let bygones be bygones.
In Leaving Las Vegas, he played a flailing screenwriter who travels to the city of debt and excess with the sole intention of drinking himself to death. Despite the dramatic storyline, Cage’s performance was uncharacteristically restrained, and it wowed critics to the point where he won an Oscar for it, which makes the case of the missing paycheck so surprising. Although the film was not an obvious crowd-pleaser, it grossed $32m off a budget of just $4m, which again, makes you think that the actor certainly should have seen some cash returns.
In an interview in 2024, he reiterated his lack of bitterness, noting, “I got to play a part that I absolutely had to play. I wasn’t going to stop, whether they paid me or not, I was making the movie“. Apparently, the company behind the movie claimed that the box office receipts weren’t enough to pay Cage the measly $100,000 it owed him, a bit of maths that is difficult to substantiate.
He wasn’t the only big name on the production who missed out on a well-deserved payday, though, with Mike Figgis, who directed the movie and wrote the screenplay, revealing that he never saw any money either.
He was nominated for directing and writing the film, and instead insisted that he and Cage got something much more valuable out of the experience, wherein, thanks to the success of the movie, they could work with anyone on any project after that, not to mention ask for whatever salary they wanted.
