Nicolas Cage Questions the Direction of Superhero Cinema
October 16, 2026
Nicolas Cage compares modern superhero films to professional wrestling and explains his preference for artistic comic-book storytelling.
Nicolas Cage thinks Marvel keeps cutting to the fight
Nicolas Cage’s criticism of the modern MCU is less about superheroes than about what he sees as a shift in priorities. At Fan Expo Dallas, he said Marvel’s earlier films did an effective job weaving character stories together but argued that newer projects increasingly funnel accomplished actors into elaborate costumes and then rush toward the next fight. His wrestling comparison was deliberately comic, but the underlying complaint was about storytelling becoming secondary to spectacle.
Spider-Noir worked because Cage saw film noir first
Nicolas Cage does not reject comic-book projects outright. Spider-Noir appealed to him because it offered something more specific: a 1930s detective world shaped by classic film noir. Cage drew on performers such as Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson and said the black-and-white version especially matched his idea of how noir should feel. The superhero element mattered, but the project interested him because it let him combine comic mythology with an older cinematic language.
Cage’s superhero history makes the critique more complicated
Nicolas Cage is criticizing superhero filmmaking from inside the genre’s history, not from a distance. He played Johnny Blaze in two Ghost Rider films and later voiced Spider-Man Noir before leading the live-action Spider-Noir series. None of those projects made him part of the MCU itself, a distinction he has emphasized. That history sharpens his argument: Cage clearly enjoys heightened comic-book material, but only when the style, character, or filmmaking gives him something stranger than a sequence of increasingly large fights.