
Nicolas Cage is one of the most prolific and bankable actors in Hollywood. Although Cage's luster soured in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the 59-year-old is experiencing a late-career resurgence lately with hits like 2021's Pig, which earned him a second nomination for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actor, and last year's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, where he played a very fictionalized version of himself.
Now, Cage will reunite with his on-screen son from the 2005 film, The Weather Man, Nicholas Hoult, in Renfield.
Ahead of the film's world premiere on March 30 (it won't hit U.S. theaters until April 14) Hoult and Cage did a Reddit AMA where they talked about plenty of things, including which "undead characters" Cage would like to play next.
According to Cage, he thinks it would be "fun" to bring the Spectre to life, but admits that the film would be a "hard one to pull off because he's virtually invincible."
And, well, Cage is right.
As a massive comic book fan (Cage named his second son, Kal-el, as a homage to Superman), Cage knows what he's talking about. He even specifically described his version of the Spectre as the "old DC comic character."
The Spectre is considered one of the most powerful beings in DC Comics, especially if unbound to a host. If memory serves right, some runs put Spectre on par in power as the monitor brothers: Mar Novu, Alpheus, and Mobius. It's a divisive take ,but it has happened before.
Unless done perfectly (and even then), it'd be extremely difficult to depict how powerful the Spectre can be in a live-action film without depowering him. But, hey, we've been proven wrong before. As one Redditor puts it plainly, Netflix "did a great show with Morpheus and he's basically unbeatable too."
There's growing interest among audiences in uber-powered characters outside of your typical superheroes. In addition to The Sandman on Netflix, a sequel to Keanu Reeves' Constantine is technically still in the works. True, it will require extensive VFX work to bring a character who can literally resize himself to be as large as the entire universe to the big screen, an actor with a deep range like Cage could play the role of Corrigan to a T.
To add to this, the theoretical movie could bring in a different voice actor for the Spectre if only to help reinforce the fact that he and his host are two different beings.
If there's anyone we can trust who can bring a relatively obscure character outside of hardcore DC Comics fans to the big screen, it's James Gunn. Now that he's head of the DC Universe, maybe he can give the self-proclaimed Trekkie a call to feel out a possible live-action Spectre film to go with "The Swamp Thing?"
In the meantime, fans are waiting on Cage to get his musical film dreams and for him to greenlight the script for National Treasure 3.
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