The Nic Cagessaince is in full effect, between him winning critical acclaim for Pig, and playing himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. In this age of the legacy sequel, film studios are probably eyeing which popular Cage properties they could resurrect for profit. Face/Off 2 is reportedly going ahead and the next one they are setting their sights on is inevitably Con Air.
It may seem unbelievable now, but Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for drama movie Leaving Las Vegas in 1995, and then immediately made The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off back-to-back in 1996-1997 – widely considered amongst the best action movies of all time. Cage revisited some of his iconic characters in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, including Face/Off’s Caster Troy.
The director of Con Air joked in 2014 about doing a Con Air sequel set in space; “I would do it if it was completely turned on its head,” Simon West said then. “Con Air in space for example, a studio version where they’re all robots or the convicts are reanimated as super-convicts. Something shocking. If it was clever writing it could work.”
But in a more recent interview with Den of Geek, West actually thinks his initially jokey idea could work; “What’s really interesting that has happened since I made that remark, is the emergence of this whole private space travel industry. We’ve got people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson setting up these companies to privatize space. That makes it [the idea of a sequel] more intriguing because it wouldn’t just be your standard space movie. It could be all to do with very up-to-the minute politics, and how big business is taking over from what governments used to do.”
“I think they (the audience) would love to see that kind of person taken down a peg or two. It’s a ripe area for mayhem and the audience would enjoy seeing people like that in jeopardy. Obviously, you would deliver the roller coaster ride of the action, but I think we’d have a really cool political underbelly to it, which I think would add this extra dimension to it and make it worth making. It would also be a comment like: ‘How did we end up like this?’”
Nic Cage’s action movies all have a rich vein of humour in them – check out our guide to the best comedy movies.