That Nicolas Cage meta film “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” at Lionsgate is set to be even more meta than you might expect.
Cage stars in the film as actor Nicolas Cage who is desperate to get a role in a new Tarantino movie while also dealing with a mountain of debt and a strained relationship with his teenage daughter. This Cage also occasionally talks to an egotistical 1990s version of himself who rides him for making too many crappy movies.
He soon finds himself forced to make an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire fan who is actually a drug cartel kingpin and so Cage is recruited by the U.S. government to gather intelligence. When the billionaire brings over Cage’s daughter and his ex-wife for a reconciliation, Cage takes on the role of a lifetime to save their lives.
Now comes word from Cage himself that Tom Gormican’s new film will see the actor recreating scenes from his iconic late 1990s works like “Con Air” and “Face/Off”. He tells Empire:
“It’s a stylized version of me, and the fact I even have to refer to myself in the third person makes me extremely uncomfortable. There are many scenes in the movie where modern or contemporary – here we go – ‘Nic Cage’ and then young ‘Nic Cage’ are colliding and arguing and battling it out. It’s an acrobatic approach to acting.
I don’t like to look back. But this movie kind of pushes it all back in my face. I’m probably going to have to look at a couple of the movies from the past again because I think we’re gonna have to reenact some of those sequences. It’s like walking through a ‘Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari’ version of ‘Con Air’ and ‘Face/Off.'”
Gormican and Kevin Etten penned the script while Kevin Turen and Mike Nilon will produce. Lionsgate won a bidding war for the property which has drawn a lot of interest.
“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” is scheduled to hit theaters on March 19th 2021.
