The “terrific” movie Nicolas Cage called the pinnacle of his straight-to-video era
You’d think that growing up with a famous family surrounding him, such as The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola as his uncle, that Nicolas Cage would be used to wealth, but that didn’t stop him from getting into serious debt later in life.
Hollywood is an unreliable world; one minute, you can be raking in millions or even billions, able to buy whatever you want and own multiple houses, and the next, you’re bankrupt. The Oscar-winning actor has always been a unique figure, appearing in many great films alongside some absolute stinkers (I’m talking about that remake of The Wicker Man), but there was a time when he was appearing in endless movies, back to back, many of which went straight to streaming.
This was the result of his frivolous overspending, which saw him spend his money on some rather preposterous things like two castles, around 15 houses and even a supposedly haunted mansion where he planned to write a horror novel, while also splashing out on countless cars and motorcycles, various unique pets, such as a two-headed snake, and even his own private island for when his castles, mansions, and beachfront homes just weren’t enough.
He needed to find a fast way to make money, and what better way than to take on as many acting jobs as possible; surely he could’ve sold a few houses or shifted his island, but instead, he couldn’t stop taking on movies, with the only problem being, many of these movies were bad.
In 2014 and 2015, he appeared in five consecutive video-on-demand movies, in what was a stint of predominantly appearing in movies made especially for streaming that came to an end in 2020, and these movies were pretty forgettable, like the negatively-received Pay the Ghost, The Runner, and Inconceivable, although Cage managed to sandwich them between a few theatrical releases in the meantime, not totally destroying his reputation as a serious star.
He admits that he is always conscious of the roles he takes on, even if they turn out to be a bit shit, telling GQ, “When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all”.
One of the movies from this era that managed to be a glittering success among a pile of decided crap was Mandy, which stood out as a much more serious effort in Cage’s repertoire at the time. A surreal blend of horror and action, the Panos Cosmatos-directed film starred the likes of Andrea Riseborough and Elijah Wood, but it sadly failed at the box office.
“They didn’t work, all of them. Some of them were terrific, like Mandy, but some of them didn’t work. But I never phoned it in. So if there was a misconception, it was that. That I was just doing it and not caring. I was caring,” Cage explained.
It might not have been a hit with audiences, but critics were impressed by Cage’s performance, clearly much more capable of picking out a good movie during this era of his career than many people suspected; Cage wasn’t just giving into straight-to-streaming slop, even if it certainly looked like it.
