I BOUGHT MY FIRST MOVIE in 1998: a DVD of Face/Off. Along with Con Air and The Rock, Face/Off completed a trifecta of movies that made Nicolas Cage one of the biggest actors of the decade. I memorized each movie, repeating “Put the bunny back in the box” and “I can eat a peach for hours.”
But just a few short years for which he won an Oscar) and cult ( ), his films began to alternate between forgettable () and iconically bad (). The 2010s only brought worse projects. Cage presumably took these roles to pay debts accrued from lavish shopping sprees, which included an island, mansions, a haunted house, and a dinosaur skull. His career trajectory—his ’90s box-office hauls competed with those of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and Leonardo DiCaprio—was looking as explosive and fiery as the crash landing in .
