Nicolas Cage’s Strangest Movie Is Getting A Sequel?
The writer of the 2021 Nicolas Cage horror-comedy Willy's Wonderland says a sequel might happen with enough luck.
Willy’s Wonderland, one of the strangest movies in Nicolas Cage’s long and weird career, might be getting a sequel. According to a Tweet from G.O. Parsons, the writer of the first film, the second anniversary of the film is prompting enthusiasm for a sequel and that is a matter of “timing/conditions/budgets/luck” whether or not there will be another one. While Willy’s Wonderland does not beg for a continuation of its storyline, it would not be at all surprising if the Renfield actor signed up for another romp with murderous animatronic animals.
Nicolas Cage starred in Willy’s Wonderland as a nameless character known only as The Janitor, who finds himself stranded outside a small Nevada town and takes up an overnight job cleaning up the titular abandoned family entertainment center. As it turns out, the family entertainment center was once the center of a cult that ritually murdered families and then transferred their souls into eight animatronic animals in an attempt to pursue a twisted kind of immortality. In the years after, the Nevada town entered into an unholy agreement with the beings in Willy’s Wonderland to provide them with sacrifices, hence Nicolas Cage being trapped in the building overnight.
However, as one might expect, Nicolas Cage’s Janitor is not as easy pickings as some of the other drifters that have come through before. Along with a group of teenagers attempting to rescue one of their own, Nicolas Cage makes it through the night, thoroughly demolishing the non-copyright-infringing Willy Weasel, Arty Alligator, Cammy Chameleon, Ozzie Ostrich, Knighty Knight, Tito Turtle, Gus Gorilla, and Siren Sara before driving out of town with remaining teen Liv (Emily Tosta) as the sun rises.
Willy’s Wonderland arrived in the early stages of Nicolas Cage’s recent renaissance after a good decade of direct-to-streaming generic action movies that made fans worried he had decided to just cash checks for the rest of his career. However, several oddball horror-adjacent films like Mandy (2018) and Color Out of Space (2019), not to mention his noir-inflected turn as a Spider-Man variant in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse indicated that the star was beginning to accept more interesting projects.
Nicolas Cage followed Willy’s Wonderland with Pig (also in 2021), a drama about a former chef attempting to recover his kidnapped pig, which also happened to be one of his most acclaimed performances in years. In 2022, the hilarious meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent cemented his return to critical good graces, as well as his undeniable screen chemistry with Pedro Pascal.
However, with the Nicholas Hoult vampire-comedy Renfield on its way, it is clear that Nicolas Cage has a fondness for tongue-in-cheek horror films. It would not take that much imagination to see a sequel in which the Janitor is being pursued by the resurrected Willy’s Wonderland animatronics in another form or in which he finds yet another family entertainment center haunted by dark forces. Might we suggest a water park this time around?
