Nicolas Cage Projects Stalled In Development

Brian Henry Nicolas Cage Projects Stalled in Development

Hollywood's anti-visionaries are at it again, keeping some of the most enticing projects in town tied up in endless rewrites. Thanks to these sluggards, all of us Cageheads out here in the Cage Fan Nation only saw one new Cage movie last year. Any year without at least four new Nic pics is a year wasted. So get your e-mails flooding into these stuffed shirts' offices so we can get our Nic-o-time now!

FireHead - In this promising concept, an emotionally volatile, devil-may-care detective suddenly acquires the occult power of turning his entire head into a ball of seething flames. Soon Buck Firehead (Nicolas Cage) is roaring across the country on his souped-up Segway, his head bursting into a weaponized inferno of death at the slightest provocation. Cate Blanchett is under consideration to play Rixette, the sexy, gritty biker chick who knows FireHead's darkest secret (that his head often turns into a ball of fire).

Man With The Future Brain - A paranormal action thriller, this gonzo concept tracks the tale of Professor Oscar T. 'Nostro' Damus (Nicolas Cage), whose migraine-inducing visions of future events disturb his lectures when they appear as extremely dramatic PowerPoint presentations on his classroom Smart Boards. Damus, a volatile, emotionally high-strung, no-holds-barred, academic maverick (with wacky thrift store shoes), tries to keep his prophetic powers secret from wise and canny department chair Hirschorn Cleveland (Morgan Freeman). But when his entire class sees his vision of humanity being incinerated by a band of flaming Hellriders in an apocalyptic wave of fire outside the Reno city limits, Damus must spring into action. Shia LeBeouf is on the short list of candidates to play Damus' charming, but feckless, assistant, Ouija.

National Treasure III: Catacombs with Numerous Secret Passages - In this projected sequel, currently in its fourth rewrite, we become reacquainted with Benjamin Franklin Gates (Cage) lecturing on his best seller, "Building Your Own Ridiculously Elaborate Cavernous Labyrinth", when he stumbles upon the fact that secret crypts located under St. Louis are carved with hieroglyphics created by Theodore Roosevelt in which the Rough Rider predicted a swarm of 21st century plagues that would bring clouds of psychic, but still very hungry, locusts down on the Plains States in herds of destruction. Gates is soon exploring the crypts with new romantic interest, entomologist Shecky Dyerson (Amy Poehler, in a rare dramatic turn) and exploding into volatile fits of disagreement with his father via cell phone (whose voice goes unheard due to Jon Voight's unusual compensation requirements).

Brian Henry

FireManiac - Volatile, drunken con-man Ty Kibler (Cage), haunted by his three failed marriages and the two Southeast Asian refugees he adopted then abandoned to fend for themselves on a desolate Caribbean Island, is transformed by an encounter in Las Vegas with Sinoa Lodilla (Halle Berry) a sleek, but volatile, temptress who's a craps dealer by day and a Satanic biker/whorehouse madam by night. When Kibler has inexplicable visions of himself making maniacal love to Sinoa in an Egyptian temple lit by sensual torches, he suddenly finds himself possessing the powers of FireManiac, a leather-jacket-wearing hellion who shoots fatal jets of fire from his index fingers at criminal wrongdoers. Jack Black is attached to portray Sinoa's charming but sleazy pimp, Sleazeboy.

Devil Dice, Asshole!- Washed-up professional poker player and volatile, emotionally distraught Las Vegas weatherman Troy Hellburner (Cage) gets a chance to redeem himself when Thai opium smuggler Sweet Lip (Penelope Cruz) hires him to waste her Chinese arch-enemies by strafing their fields with napalm from a motorized hang glider. But when Troy's glider is shot down by former Maoist general turned drug-dealer Ching Fick (Chow Yun-Fat), he becomes enmeshed in a high stakes game of tossing small white dice where Satan controls the odds and only Troy's willingness to sell his soul to a cackling Chinese demon (Margaret Cho) can save Lip's opium harvest and redeem two Chinese orphans who appear outside the hut sometime during the game.