Only the most ardent and dedicated of Nicolas Cage fans would actively go out of their way to keep up to date with all of his latest releases, with the 56 year-old having appeared in 31 movies in the last seven years alone, the overwhelming majority of which have been terrible bargain bin action thrillers.
The Academy Award winner has a further six projects in various stages of development, and the only one that sounds remotely interesting is The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which will see the actor play a fictionalized version of himself as a fading A-lister relying on former glories that ends up being roped into a plot involving drug cartels and the CIA.
On his day, Cage is still one of the finest talents of his generation, but performances to remind people of that fact are very few and far between. Of course, the Con Air star is one of the only names to have played both Spider-Man and Superman having completed the double whammy in 2018 thanks to voice roles in Teen Titans Go! to the Movies and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but his first major superhero film came along much earlier than that and is headed to Netflix this week, when Ghost Rider arrives on October 1st.
Nicolas Cage is such a big fan of the character that he has a tattoo of the supernatural antihero, but Mark Steven Johnson’s blockbuster doesn’t maximize the potential of either the concept or the inherent madness you’d expect from having such a famously eccentric actor cast as a motorcycle stunt rider who sells their soul to the devil and ends up with their skull on fire. That being said, Netflix is the place where forgotten movies find a new lease of life, so Ghost Rider could well end up cracking the Top 10 most-watched list when it debuts in just a few days.
