Tag: nicholas cage

‘Face/Off 2’ Director Adam Wingard is Now/Gone

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Do you remember when it was announced a Face/Off sequel was in development? If so, you’ll be displeased to hear the sequel’s hit a snag after its director dropped out.

First reported by Collider earlier this week, Adam Wingard has left the project he was co-writing with Simon Barrett. No particular reason was given for his leave, but Collider noted he was first attached to the project since its official announcement, and even hyped it up during the press run for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in 2024. With this sequel now off his plate, Wingard’s focused on his upcoming A24 film Onslaught. It’s unclear how his leave affects Barrett, who he’s worked with on various films, Onslaught and New Empire included.

After Wingard was first attached to Face/Off 2, returning star Nicholas Cage indicated it’d be a face-swapping feast. Not only would he and John Travolta change faces again, so would the now-grown versions of their kids from the original film. “It becomes three-dimensional chess,” said Cage in 2023. “It’s four of us ping-ponging and going at different levels, and it becomes even more complex.” With new creative voices now able to take over, hopefully that part of the film stays in the changeover. It sounds amazingly dumb, and way too good of a premise to lose.

We’ll have more on Face/Off 2 as news emerges.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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Justin Carter

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February 22, 2026
Box Office: ‘Despicable Me 4’ Easily Wins With $44.7M as ‘Longlegs’ Stuns With Record $22.6M Launch

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Animation continue to the be hero of the summer office thanks to Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2, but Neon‘s Longlegs can rightly take a bow after scoring the biggest opening for an independent horror pic in a decade with $22.6 million in ticket sales.

From Illumination and Universal, DM4 easily stayed atop the domestic box office chart in its second weekend with $44.7 million from 4,449 theaters as it jumped the $200 million mark to finish Sunday with a North American tally of $211.1 million. Overseas, Gru and the mischievous Minions also continued to stir up strong sales, earning $88 million from 78 markets for a foreign tally of $226.7 million and $437.8 million globally.

In a notable milestone, the Despicable Me/Minions franchise has crossed $5 billion mark in global ticket sales, a feat no animated franchise has achieved before. (Earlier this week, Illumination announced that a Minions 3 is in the works.)

The big surprise of the weekend is the better-than-expected performance of writer-director Osgood Perkins Longlegs, a serial killer chiller starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage. The tense FBI procedural, playing in 2,510 cinemas, is the biggest opening ever for Tom Quinn‘s Oscar-winning specialty production and distribution outfit Neon, home of Parasite.

Among other records, it’s Cage’s biggest opening since National Treasure: Book of Secrets almost twenty years ago in 2007. It’s also the top R-rated opening of 2024 to date. And it is the only indie horror film of the past decade to open to $20 million or more (this excludes one of the Insidious movies from Focus Features/Universal).

Going back as far as 25 years, Neon also notes that very few indie films have crossed the $20 million threshold in their debut. For purposes of context, however, many indie titles — including Neon releases — only open a few theaters, versus rolling out nationwide from the get-go as Longlegs did.

The well-reviewed movie earned $10 million on Friday alone, including previews, and wasn’t hampered by a C+ Cinemascore, since it’s common for the horror genre to land a grade in the C range. Fun fact: More than 70 percent of ticket buyers were between ages 18 and 34.

The record-shattering Inside Out 2 — which has a shot at becoming the top-grossing animated film of all time — finished Sunday with a global cume of $1.35 billion. It’s already become the top-grossing Pixar title of all time and the third biggest animated title, not adjusted for inflation. The film has helped propel Disney become the first major studio to cross the $2 billion mark in 2024 global ticket sales.

In North America, Inside Out 2 came in third in its fifth weekend with $20.8 million for a domestic tally of $572.6 million. Overseas, it earned another $50.2 million from 47 markets for a foreign cume of $777.5 million. It has yet to open in Japan, where it could do sizeable business.

Paramount’s holdover A Quiet Place: Day One continues to entice moviegoers and placed fourth despite the entry of Longlegs. The prequel scared up another $11.8 million this weekend from 3,378 theaters for a domestic total of $116.2 million through Sunday.

Apple Original Films‘ continues its theatrical ambitions with the release of director Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon, a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. The period space-age movie, distributed by Sony on behalf of Apple, opened to a subdued $10 million from 3,356 sites to place No. 5. The number isn’t a surprise considering the film was fueled by older adults; more than half of ticket buyers were 45 or older, including 32 percent over the age of 55.

The movie has earned meh reviews, but audiences were kinder in bestowing the older-skewing film an A- CinemaScore. Reviews matter more to older moviegoers, upon whom Berlanti’s film is relying, but Apple and Sony believe the film will have long legs, similar to Ticket to Paradise, which opened to $16.5 million domestically on its way to topping out at $68 million, and Where the Crawdads Sing, which opened to $17.7 million and topped out at $90 million domestic.

At the specialty box office, new offerings include A24‘s Sing Sing, which is on course to score a solid per-theater average of $34,280 or thereabouts from four theaters in Los Angeles and New York. The film, from director Greg Kwedar, chronicles an arts program at the infamous Sing Sing prison.

July 14, 7:45 a.m. Updated with revised estimates.

This story was originally published July 13 at 10:16 a.m.

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Pamela McClintock

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July 14, 2024
Nicholas Cage Made Longlegs a “Deeply Personal” Role

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Say what you will about Nicholas Cage, he always goes for it in whatever movie he’s in. The newly released Longlegs has kept him out of the movie’s marketing in a direct capacity, but slivers of footage and pre-release hype about his reportedly freaky look have drawn a lot of attention. And in playing the titular serial killer targeting families, Cage used parts of his own family history to inform his performance.

Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Cage recalled a moment from his childhood where he saw his mother Joy Vogelsang putting on Noxzema cold cream. Being two at the time, he remembers seeing her “turn her face really fast and stared at me after [putting on] the cold cream. The whiteness of [it] just really spooked me.” In the film, Longlegs has a ghastly white complexion similar to that moment with Cage’s mother, but without a clear motive. The actor doesn’t have a specific reason as for why his character is so white, but noted the “strange connection” between killer and color. “He says it’s just a force he’s aware of, and you don’t question it too much,” Cage notes. “He knows it when he sees it.”

Performance-wise, Cage previously called this a “deeply personal” role owing to his mother’s schizophrenia throughout her life. In June, he told EW about how she’d talk in poetic terms, something he also brought into Longlegs. To Cage, the character is a tragic figure because he’s “at the mercy of these voices talking to him.” Ahead of shooting in early 2023, he’d record his performance on his phone to nail the character’s “rhythms and melodies. […] By the time I got on set, it was so dialed in and became almost like performing a song or a bit of music.”

Cage’s interview also contains Longlegs spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, don’t go past the banner below.

In the film’s climax, Maika Monroe’s Harker finally comes face-to-face with Longlegs, who’s been giving dolls possessed with Satanic energy to families of girls born on specific days. It’s eventually revealed that he’d targeted her as a young girl, but was spared thanks to her mother’s intervention. The meeting where they “reunite,” and Longlegs’ suicide in front of her, is why Cage joined the film in the first place. The two actors didn’t socialize prior to that point–a move he believes was intentional from director Osgood Perkins–and he’d been really looking forward to the “explosive” encounter between their characters.

Turns out, the scene has a meta layer added onto it. Cage professed to being a fan of Monroe and her horror chops in films like It Follows and Watcher. Like with some audiences, It Follows was his first time seeing her, and he called the film “one of my favorites in the genre.” Cheekily, he also drew parallels between the adoration for his costar and Longlegs’ years-long obsession with Harker, calling her “a hero of sorts” his character finally had the pleasure of meeting.

Before that point, the movie goes out of its way to not shoot Longlegs directly. Instead, he’s glimpsed through different angles or reflections. Perkins explained it as showing how the killer left such an impression on Harker as a child, even as she supressed that memory. He’s there, in a sense, said Perkins, but he’s “totally not there, but [also] totally there.”

From the pre-release buzz, Cage is delivering a pretty unnerving (complimentary!) performance in Longlegs that’s enough to get folks to see it in droves. After seeing him do so many roles over the decades, it’s nice to know that he can find new ways to freak people the hell out.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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Justin Carter

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July 13, 2024
A Major Donation of Fossils Will Help Rebuild the National Museum of Brazil

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The National Museum of Brazil hopes to reopen by 2026. Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images

Burkhard Pohl, the Swiss-German owner of one of the world’s biggest collections of private fossils, is making a major gift to help rebuild the holdings of the National Museum of Brazil. Located in Rio de Janeiro, the 200-year-old institution lost the majority of its 20 million artifacts in a devastating 2018 fire.

In accepting Pohl’s donation of more than 1,100 fossils that include dinosaurs, turtles, plants, insects and flying reptiles, the museum is kickstarting a campaign ahead of its planned 2026 reopening to restore what was lost. The National Museum of Brazil will partner with Pohl’s fossil and gem-mining company Interprospekt Group and the arts nonprofit group Instituto Inclusaritz to rally collectors and the scientific community to help replenish its collection. “We hope this will serve as an example for others, especially individuals, to participate in the reconstruction of the main museum of natural history and anthropology in South America,” said Alexander Kellner, the museum’s director, in a statement.

Burkhard Pohl (left), Alexander Kellner (right) and Frances Reynolds (center), founder of Instituto Inclusaritz. Diogo Vasconcellos/Courtesy National Museum of Brazil

Pohl comes from a long line of prominent collectors. The art holdings of his grandfather Karl Stroeher formed the basis of Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art, while his mother Erika Pohl-Stroeher owned Europe’s largest collection of minerals and gems. Pohl, meanwhile, has spent the past five decades amassing fossils. He’s even co-founded two museums—the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and China’s Sino-German Paleontological Museum—dedicated to the field.

A lucrative market for paleontological material

The Swiss-German entrepreneur isn’t the only prominent enthusiast of fossils, which have fetched staggering sums at auction in recent years with a tyrannosaurus rex selling for $31.8 million at Sotheby’s in 2020 and another dinosaur skeleton fetching $12.4 million in 2022. Mauricio Fernández Garza, the former mayor of Mexico’s San Pedro Garza Garcia, oversees a $120 million collection of fossils, artifacts and artwork, while German investor Christian Angermayer’s wide-ranging collection includes a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and triceratops head.

Even celebrities like Nicholas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio have gotten involved in fossil sales. Cage outbid DiCaprio to acquire a rare dinosaur skull for $276,000 in 2007, although the actor later agreed to return the fossil to Mongolia after discovering it had been looted.

The donation includes the well-preserved skull of a pterosaur. Handerson Oliveira/Courtesy National Museum of Brazil

Pohl’s gift to the National Museum of Brazil includes rare fossils like those of two dinosaurs that have never been previously described in scientific literature and two unstudied pterosaur skulls. The 1,104 fossils also include an example of the Tetrapodophis, which is possibly the earliest snake fossil.

Much of the donated collection comes from Brazil’s Araripe Basin, located between the states of Ceará, Pernambuco and Piauí. The region contains the Crato and Romualdo units, two formations that date back to 115 million and 110 million years ago respectively and are treasure troves for paleontological fossils.

The museum tragically lost much of its collection in a 2018 fire. Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images

The museum, which is associated with the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution. After a fire triggered by a faulty air conditioning unit set its main building ablaze in 2018, it lost 85 percent of its entire collection and the majority of its entomology holdings and displays of Egyptian and South American mummies. While the National Museum of Brazil currently has around 2,000 objects ready for exhibition, it hopes to gather 10,000 more in the next two years, Kellner told the Guardian.

In addition to urging other collectors to contribute to rebuilding efforts, the institution’s collaboration with the Interprospekt Group will invite Brazilian researchers to participate in excavations in the U.S. In August of 2023, they hosted their first joint excavation at the Hell Creek Formation in Wyoming and Montana, inviting six Brazilian paleontologists and students in a mission that could bring North American dinosaurs to Brazil for display.

“I look forward to seeing how this collaboration enriches the museum’s offerings and inspires future generations,” said Pohl in a statement. “I hope others will join this important, collective effort to restore Brazil’s natural history collection.”

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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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May 10, 2024
Nicholas Cage Is “Heartbroken” Over Death of Ex-Wife Lisa Marie Presley

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Nicolas Cage is bereft over the news of his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley’s death, sharing some warm memories from their time together.

The actor wrote in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, “This is devastating news. Lisa had the greatest laugh of anyone I ever met. She lit up every room, and I am heartbroken.” He added, “I find some solace believing she is reunited with her son Benjamin.” Cage was married to the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley from 2002 to 2004. In July 2020, her son Benjamin Keough died by suicide at age 27.

Presley died Thursday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center after experiencing cardiac arrest in her Calabasas home, two days after attending the Golden Globes. She was 54. Her mother Priscilla announced the news in a statement later that day, writing, “It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us. She was the most passionate strong and loving woman I have ever known. We ask for privacy as we try to deal with this profound loss. Thank you for the love and prayers. At this time there will be no further comment.”

Presley is survived by her 33-year-old daughter Riley Keough and 14-year-old twins, Harper and Finley.

Her ex-husband Michael Lockwood, whom she was married to from 2006 to 2021, released a statement to the New York Post via his lawyer who said that the musician’s “world has been turned on its ear. He is with both of his daughters now.” Presley was married two additional times, to Danny Keough from 1988 to 1994 and Michael Jackson from 1994 to 1996. Jackson’s estate also released a tribute to the late songwriter, sharing on Instagram, “We are saddened by the sudden tragic loss of Michael’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley. Michael cherished the special bond they enjoyed and was comforted by Lisa Marie’s generous love, concern and care during their times together.”

Since the news broke, a number of stars have publicly mourned Presley’s passing, including John Travolta who wrote on Instagram, “Lisa baby girl, I’m so sorry. I’ll miss you but I know I’ll see you again. My love and heart goes out to Riley, Priscilla, Harper and Finley.” Leah Remini tweeted a similar sentiment, writing, “I’m heartbroken over the passing of Lisa Marie Presley. Lisa did not have an easy life, as some might think. May she be at peace, resting with her son and father now. Her mom Priscilla and her three daughters, Riley, Finley, and Harper, are in my prayers.” Octavia Spencer added, “So sad that we’ve lost another bright star in Lisa Marie Presley. My condolences to her loved ones and multitude of fans.” And Tom Hanks, one of the stars of the new Elvis bio-pic, wrote plainly on Instagram, “We are heartbroken over the loss of Lisa Marie Presley. Absolutely broken…”

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Emily Kirkpatrick

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January 13, 2023