Time is a flat circle, or so that one TV show said, and everything old is constantly new again, and so it’s time. Time for a new generation to experience a cinematic Dracula played by an actor whose casting is so obvious, it seems impossible he hasn’t played the role before. In the ’90s, we got Gary Oldman as Dracula. This made perfect sense at the time. But the ’20s will also get the Dracula we deserve, and his name is Nicolas Cage.
Cage, according to The Hollywood Reporter, has joined the cast of Universal’s Renfield, the studio’s latest attempt to make Universal Monsters into a thing. (Previous attempts include that Tom Cruise Mummy movie.) Renfield is set to star Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class) as Dracula’s flunkie, a human believed to be insane. (Tom Waits played him in the 1992 Dracula.)
Plot details have not been announced, but the movie is expected to be “comedic in tone.”
Other than providing the voice of Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Cage hasn’t been in a big studio movie for a while, choosing instead to appear in films like Wally’s Wonderland (pictured above) and Jiu Jitsu. He generally seems like he’s having a good time, a vibe which he’ll presumably bring to his role as Renfield’s master. Imagine the relish with which he might make his henchmen eat bugs and rats! The mind boggles.
Renfield is being directed by Chris McKay, whose credits include The Tomorrow War and The Lego Batman Movie. The screenplay is by Ryan Ridley (Rick and Morty) and the story outline was done by Robert Kirkman—yes, the Walking Dead guy. There’s no word yet on when it will arrive in theaters.
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Nicolas Cage as Dracula is the treat we didn’t know we needed and deserved. I can’t wait to see him chewing the scenery with vampire fangs!
Calling it now, his new name is Nicula Cage. :-D
Cage has experience; he already played a “vampire” in the movie Vampire’s Kiss.
Well, in a manner of speaking. You’ll just have to see it for yourself. It’s a trip (and free to watch right now on Kanopy). I mean, besides being completely unhinged, he famously ate a live cockroach in that particular performance. Yup.
The Unshaved Mouse is going to laugh his whiskers off – please excuse me, I need to be the very first to let him know!
Right, I’ve just screamed my excitement into the ear of an unsuspecting Mouse (he actually compared Mr Nicholas Cage to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula – or, depending on how you look at it, vice versa – all the way back in AD 2019, for one of his BATS Vs BOLTS reviews), so let me just say how delighted I am to read that Mr Cage has been cast as a comedy Dracula.
Not least because now WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS can finally call on the Dracula it deserves!
…
I’m a little more ambivalent to the casting of Mr Nicholas Hoult as Renfield; on the one hand he’s too young for the role by half (in the book R.M. Renfield is 59 years old), but on the other hand he makes an excellent choice for a Dwight Frye-type Renfield (who is something of a Renfield & Jonathan Harker hybrid) and this gives me hope that the movie will be a properly Universal Monster Movies Dracula.
Hopefully this being explicitly Renfield’s movie will allow Count Dracula to be real b****** of a villain, even if he is a comic (hopefully a darkly comic) one.
I was really excited about this and read a couple of paragraphs to my wife who misheard me and also got excited because she thought that Nick CAVE was playing Dracula.
And now I want that to happen..
It can’t POSSIBLY be as over-the-top as his Fu Manchu….
@7. DigiCom: It’s Nicolas Cage playing COUNT DRACULA in a movie almost certainly told from the perspective of an actual lunatic – if I weren’t a miserly, miserly soul I’d take that bet! (-;