Well, this is some disappointing news. Nicolas Cage will no longer play Joe Exotic of Tiger King fame after the actor revealed that the project may have stalled and even shelved.
Following the Tiger King craze of last year, several competing adaptations were in the works. One of which from Amazon cast Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage to play the eccentric wildlife enthusiast. However, speaking with Variety, Cage says he is no longer attached to Amazon’s version and that it may not even go forward.
“We should clear the record,” Cage says in an interview. “I read two excellent scripts, which I did think were excellent, but I think Amazon ultimately felt that it was material that had become past tense because it took so long for it [to] come together. They felt at one point that it was lightning in the bottle, but that point has since faded into the distance and it’s no longer relevant.”
Last year Netflix released the true-crime documentary Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness and it quickly became a sensation. Several different Tiger King projects were fast-tracked, but soon after the COVID-19 pandemic hit and many of those projects stalled.
Since then, Tiger King may have become yesterday’s news, although a rival Tiger King project starring Kate McKinnon and John Cameron Mitchell is still set to go at Peacock.
Tiger King bowed in March 2020 on Netflix and was one of the first shows to break out when much of the country was stuck at home as the pandemic began to spread rapidly across the globe.
The series was a breakout hit for the streamer, as measured by Nielsen and Netflix’s internal metrics. Viewers in the U.S. spent several billion minutes watching the show, according to Nielsen.
