Exclusive: Nicolas Cage In Talks For Anaconda Reboot
Nicolas Cage may star in a reboot of Anaconda from director Tom Gormican.
Nicolas Cage may join the cast of the upcoming reboot of Anaconda, the 1997 monster snake movie starring Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube, and Jon Voight. According to our trusted and proven sources, the Lord of War actor is in negotiations to join the reboot, which is being helmed by Tom Gormican, the filmmaker behind his critically acclaimed comeback vehicle The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. The mere prospect of Nicolas Cage in a new version of Anaconda is enough to get us excited, but reuniting him with the director of his best (and weirdest) project in years is a whole other level.
If Sony Pictures can lock down Nicolas Cage for the Anaconda reboot, one would have to assume he would be playing the Jon Voight role, which is to say, a thickly-accented, shifty-eyed snake hunter of somewhat dubious origin. It is not yet clear whether the original movie is being hard rebooted (which is to say, the story being remade to a greater or lesser degree) or revived (i.e., the original being narratively continued in some way), so it is not certain whether Nicolas Cage would be playing the exact same snake hunter from Anaconda or just a very similar role.
However, if you manage to get Nicolas Cage to appear in a movie about a giant deadly anaconda in the Amazon, it would be pretty absurd not to let him lean into his predilection for wild accents and crazed behavior. While Cage is an Academy Award-winning actor capable of nuanced, subtle acting, he is basically unparalleled at going completely unhinged on camera when he wants to. If there is a better story for that than Anaconda, it is difficult to imagine.
Nicolas Cage had a long fallow period in his career in the 2010s (reportedly to pay down debts and his mother’s medical career) but has recently resurged with a series of critically acclaimed roles, so why not Anaconda next? The Ghost Rider actor is certainly no stranger to horror-adjacent films, having already starred in cult classics like the Satanic cult revenge thriller Mandy, the animatronic beat-em-up movie Willy’s Wonderland, and whatever Drive Angry is. Getting Nicolas Cage to sink his teeth into Anaconda has a lot of potential.
Speaking of which, Nicolas Cage’s new film has him portraying a different kind of fanged beast than the humble Eunectes murinus (that’s the giant green anaconda). Currently, Nicolas Cage is fulfilling a lifelong dream by portraying Count Dracula in the new film Renfield, alongside Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, and Ben Schwartz. Reportedly, the film caused him to drink some (of his own) blood during production, so who knows what he could do with this one.
Tom Gormican’s previous film with Nicolas Cage, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, was a heavily meta-comedy in which the actor played a version of himself who teams up with Pedro Pascal for an increasingly improbable adventure. With that in mind, it will be interesting to see what the two could cook up for Anaconda. We hope negotiations go well.
