At a Dallas fan convention the actor, who has played two different Marvel superheroes himself, said the genre has traded storytelling for men in costumes waiting to throw punches.
Nicolas Cage picked a comic-book convention to take a swing at comic-book movies. Onstage at Fan Expo Dallas over the weekend, the actor said the Marvel Cinematic Universe is turning into, in his words, "a well-funded and glorified WWE," stocked with actors in their fifties squeezed into "ridiculous outfits" before every scene cuts straight to a brawl.
He wasn't shy about who he meant. "These 50-plus and otherwise intelligent and remarkably gifted thespians," Cage said, describing a genre he clearly still loves, or did once. "I do say this with love," he added, which is the kind of line that lands funnier in a room full of people in costume than it does on a transcript.
According to Variety, which cited The Playlist's account of the panel, Cage drew a line between where Marvel started and where it's ended up. "It started out, in my view, terrific," he said of the early films, praising how they wove separate heroes' backstories together. The complaint, per both Variety and TheWrap, is about what came after. Too much suiting up, not enough reason to care who wins the fight.
TheWrap reported the remark got a laugh out of the Dallas crowd, which tracks. Cage is hardly an outsider lobbing stones. He played Ghost Rider twice, in 2007 and again in 2012's Spirit of Vengeance, and showed up in Kick-Ass and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He named his own son Kal-El back in 2005. This is a man who has worn the tights.
More to the point, he just finished a Marvel show of his own. Spider-Noir, the Prime Video series adapted by Oren Uziel, cast Cage as a down-and-out Ben Reilly working a detective's beat in Depression-era New York, shot in black and white with a deliberate noir texture. Cage told Variety he built the performance around Bogart, Cagney and Edward G. Robinson rather than anything from the Marvel playbook. The show ran eight episodes and was cancelled after that single season.
And that's exactly the contrast Cage kept drawing at the panel. "One of the things I like about Spider-Noir, it wasn't cutting to the fight," he told the Dallas crowd, according to TheWrap. "It was a detective story. There was a mystery there." His ask is simple enough: get back to telling stories instead of staging what he calls a wrestling match.
The irony writes itself. Ghost Rider, the character Cage played twice outside the MCU, is finally joining it properly, with Ryan Gosling in the role and Shawn Levy directing for a July 28, 2028 release. Whether that film ends up closer to Cage's noir detective or his WWE jab is a question for 2028.
For now, Cage moves on to playing NFL figure John Madden in Prime Video's biopic, directed by David O. Russell and landing in November. No capes involved, as far as anyone's reported.
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