Let me start off this article by saying that I absolutely loved The Rock. The movie, Dwayne Johnson is cool, but I don’t have bro-love for him. I don’t hate Nicolas Cage, but he is paid an insane amount of money for some pretty crappy movies.
I decided to take a sampling of some of his work to see why he’s a $20 million dollar per film man. It’d take me well over 300 years in order to earn that amount at my current salary and he can do that in a single year. My mom is a fan, too, by the way.
Lets get started. For the Data, I decided to take a sampling of a few films, not all, because although I do have too much time, I don’t have that much, and I’m not OCD:
The films I chose are: Valley Girl, Vampire’s Kiss, Leaving Las Vegas, The Rock, Face/Off, Snake Eyes, Bringing Out The Dead, Gone in 60 Seconds, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Windtalkers, Adaptation, National Treasure, Ghost Rider and National Treasure 2. I was going to put Next in there, but I couldn’t find his salary for it, and it sucked so bad I wanted to forget about it.
So, he’s obviously made some people very very rich. The National Treasure franchise is better than printing your own money. Comparing how much the difference in money from his salary to the film income:
Based upon this diagram, we can see that Windtalkers was a HUGE mistake 30% of the film’s gross was chewed by by his salary alone. Ghost Rider was a huge mistake as well, not only for what he was paid, but because it was absolutely terrible. One of the worst movies I’ve watched in the last 5 years easily. That being said, the studios are pulling in some good coin by casting him as the leading man. For National Treasure 2, Cage was paid $31,000,000, yet you can see how much it hauled in. That is a huge ticket item for that studio! Based upon this alone, Cage is worth every penny!!
Looking at his films, how many of them have actually been good?
Adaptation scored well, and so did Leaving Las Vegas, The Rock and Face/Off. It appears Monsieur Cage needs to stay away from undead characters. They don’t do that well money-wise, and they, well, suck. The special effects were pretty cool, though. Just had to ruin it by spending $4 on the script.
Here are the numbers:
