Nicolas Cage’s Prehistoric Adventure Is Streaming For Free Right Now
The Croods, starring Nicolas Cage, is currently number two on Freevee's top streaming movies chart.
Nicolas Cage has appeared in over 100 films throughout his illustrious career, with significant peaks and valleys in quality. Now, his 2013 computer animated Dreamworks film, The Croods, is available to stream for free on Freevee, according to Flix Patrol. The film has an incredible cast of talented voice actors, and went on to spawn a sequel and a Netflix original series.
The Croods stars Nicolas Cage as Grug, a bumbling caveman from the fictional Croodaceous period, an era of early man which features dinosaurs as well as fictional animal creations. The film was written and directed by Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders, with an additional writing credit to Monty Python legend John Cleese. Sanders, who also lent his voice to the production, is best known for writing classic Disney films such as Lilo & Stitch and 1998’s Mulan.
In the film, Nicolas Cage’s Grug strictly forces his family of cave people to remain within the safety of their cave, which shields them from a host of natural disasters as well as dangerous predators. After an earthquake destroys the cave, the family stumbles upon a modern man named Guy, as voiced by Ryan Reynolds. Guy is an inventor, creating several complex machines far in advance of what the Croods family previously thought possible.
After venturing out into the great unknown, the Croods attempt to find a new cave to live in, with Guy leading the way. At first, adjusting to life outside the cave seems impossible, but after a while of adventuring across the vast terrain, the family find returning to cave life untenable. Joining Nicolas Cage and Ryan Reynolds in the cast are veteran actors Cloris Leachman and Randy Thom, as well as Emma Stone, Catherine Keener, and Hot Tub Time Machine‘s Clark Duke.
The film acts as a sort of modern day retelling of Plato’s Cave, a metaphor of the mental limitations placed upon people who don’t dare to venture outside of their known world. Grug was designed specifically for Nicolas Cage after Cage famously turned down the role of Shrek back in 2001, prompting Dreamworks animators to craft a character design more to his liking. The film grossed over $182 million, making it the 4th highest grossing animated movie of 2013, after Frozen, Despicable Me 2, and Monsters University.
Originally, The Croods was meant to be made by Aardman animation studios, famous for their stop motion work such as Wallace and Gromit and Flushed Away. The rights were eventually diverted to Dreamworks after a meeting with John Cleese, prompting Aardman to take the idea of a caveman film and apply it to their 2018 film Early Man. Once Dreamworks got a hold of the intellectual property, they promptly signed Nicolas Cage as the lead, and the rest was history.
In case you were living in a cave during the film’s meteoric rise in 2013, now’s your chance to catch the hit animated feature for free. Nicolas Cage would go on to lend his voice to future films such as Spider-Man: Into The Spider Verse, and the 2020 Croods sequel, The Croods: A New Age.
