Nicolas Cage just said the quiet part out loud, and honestly? I’ve been waiting for someone with his level of clout to say it. In a recent interview, Cage – yes, that Nicolas Cage, the man who’s played a vampire, a national treasure hunter, and himself in a movie about being himself – compared the Marvel Cinematic Universe to WWE. Not as a compliment. He called it “a well-funded and glorified” version of pro wrestling, complete with grown adults in “ridiculous outfits.” And look, I laughed out loud when I read that, because it’s exactly the kind of blunt, slightly unhinged honesty we’ve come to expect from him.

Wait, Did Nic Cage Just Roast the Biggest Franchise on Earth?

Yeah. He kind of did. And I don’t think he was even trying to be provocative for clicks, which somehow makes it land harder. Cage has never really played the Hollywood diplomacy game – the guy has spent decades doing whatever weird, gonzo project called to him, from Wicker Man remakes to indie horror flicks nobody saw coming. So when he takes a shot at the MCU, it doesn’t feel like a bitter old actor complaining that nobody casts him as Iron Man. It feels like an outside observer just… calling it like he sees it.

Here’s the thing about the WWE comparison though – it’s not even that much of a stretch once you sit with it. Think about it. You’ve got recurring characters with exaggerated personas. You’ve got storylines that stretch across years and multiple “shows” (movies, in this case) that all feed into some bigger event. You’ve got costumes that are, let’s be real, pretty ridiculous when you actually stop and look at them instead of just accepting them as “superhero stuff.” Fifty-plus-year-old actors squeezed into spandex and capes, throwing punches that clearly don’t connect, all building toward some mega crossover event where everyone shows up to fight the same generic purple or gray CGI villain. Sound familiar?

The Spandex Problem

I want to dwell on that “ridiculous outfits” line for a second because it’s the part that’s sticking with me the most, not gonna lie. There’s something almost poetic about an actor known for his own over-the-top choices calling out other actors for looking silly. Cage has worn some outfits in his career too – remember the bear suit in Wicker Man? But maybe that’s exactly why his comment carries weight. He’s not judging from some ivory tower of prestige acting. He’s judging as someone who’s been in the trenches of “this costume is objectively goofy but I’m doing it anyway.”

Is He Actually Wrong, Though?

This is where I have to be honest with you: I don’t think he’s wrong. Not entirely, anyway. The MCU at its best – the first Iron Man, Winter Soldier, even Infinity War when it actually stuck the landing – felt like genuine filmmaking with stakes and character work. But somewhere around Phase 4 or 5, depending on who you ask, it started to feel like scheduled programming. Like a season pass. You watch this Disney+ show so you understand why this character shows up in that movie, and then that movie sets up the next crossover event, and the wheel just keeps turning. That’s not a knock on any individual actor’s performance. It’s a structural thing. It’s the business model.

“It’s becoming a well-funded and glorified WWE,” Cage reportedly said, pointing directly at the spectacle-over-substance drift that a lot of longtime moviegoers have felt but couldn’t quite articulate.

And I think that’s really the sharpest part of his critique – not the outfits, not even the wrestling comparison exactly, but the “well-funded” part. Because WWE has never pretended to be prestige drama. It knows what it is. It’s theater, it’s spectacle, it’s soap opera with body slams. The issue some people (myself included, if I’m being honest) have with the MCU is that it still wants credit for being Cinema with a capital C while also operating like a content pipeline designed to keep subscriptions active and toy shelves stocked.

The Actor Angle Nobody’s Talking About Enough

What’s interesting here is what this says about how actors in their fifties and sixties are being used in these franchises. Cage basically pointed out that you’ve got legitimate, talented performers – people who’ve done real dramatic work, people with range – putting on rubber suits and CGI helmets to do choreographed fight scenes that a stunt team mostly executes anyway. There’s an argument that this is just… what the job is now. Acting has changed. Big-budget filmmaking has changed. But there’s also something a little sad about it if you think too hard, and I think that’s what Cage tapped into, even if he did it in a joking, off-the-cuff way.

I’ve seen this pattern before, actually – it happens with basically every dominant genre in Hollywood history. Westerns got formulaic and repetitive before people got sick of them. Same with the disaster movie boom in the 70s, same with the erotic thriller wave in the 90s. Eventually the audience notices the machinery behind the curtain, and once you notice it, it’s really hard to unsee. Superhero fatigue isn’t a new concept, critics have been predicting the MCU’s collapse for like eight years now, and yet the movies keep making money (mostly). So maybe Cage isn’t predicting anything new. Maybe he’s just saying the thing everyone already halfway believes but doesn’t want to say because it sounds like hating on something popular.

What This Actually Means

Here’s my honest take: I don’t think Marvel’s going anywhere. WWE hasn’t gone anywhere either, for what it’s worth – it’s still filling arenas decades later, still selling out pay-per-views, still making money hand over fist. So if Cage’s comparison is meant as an insult, it might actually be more accurate as a business model compliment. Comic book movies and pro wrestling both figured out the same trick: give people recurring characters they’re emotionally invested in, dress it up in spectacle, and keep the story going indefinitely so nobody ever really leaves.

But there’s a real cost to that model too, and I think that’s what’s nagging at people. When everything becomes an ongoing show instead of a self-contained story, individual movies stop mattering as movies. They become episodes. And when actors – talented ones, people who could be doing genuinely interesting work – end up as recurring cast members in a never-ending universe, wearing outfits that, sure, look cool on a poster but kind of ridiculous in actual motion… yeah. Cage might be onto something. Whether Marvel takes the criticism to heart or just shrugs it off and announces Phase 7 anyway is honestly the more interesting question. My money’s on the shrug.