When Nic Cage Removes the Hair Piece That's "Oscar Mode" (This Week In Movie Posters)

Nicolas Cage is everywhere, again! Also there are other posters.

Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

We begin this week, through the vagaries of Substack’s image-adding function, with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. This one is actually William Friedkin’s final film (adapted from the 1953 play, which was itself based on a novel that spawned a Humphrey Bogart movie). It doesn’t seem entirely right that William Friedkin’s final film should be straight to streaming on Showtime, even though on some level I know that saying that is sort of like yelling at the people who showed up to your birthday party that not enough people showed up to your birthday party. They don’t need to be catching strays for the crime of doing the right thing.

That being said, when people bash the streamers who buy movies, it’s mostly because of the sense that they don’t do much to actually promote those movies. And the fact that the poster doesn’t actually say anything about this being William Friedkin’s final film seems to confirm that.

I’m not sure what I’m even supposed to get from this poster. It looks like they mislabeled Harvey Keitel.

This poster for Butcher’s Crossing is one of two Nicolas Cage vehicles being promoted this week, and guess what? He’s bald in both of them! That’s Oscar mode, baby!

Actually, it seems like Dream Scenario, the other Bald Nic Cage vehicle with a poster this week, from A24 (I wrote up that trailer here), is the genuine Oscar play, and Butcher’s Crossing is just drafting on the momentum. This one actually played at TIFF last year, but isn’t hitting theaters until next month. Nice timing!

Butcher’s Crossing is the feature directing debut of Gabe Polsky, who made two great documentaries about Russians and hockey (Red Army and Red Penguins).

An Ivy League drop-out travels to the Colorado wilderness, where he joins a team of buffalo hunters on a journey that puts his life and sanity at risk. Based on the highly acclaimed novel by John Williams. [IMDB]

“Sanity at risk” is kind of implied when Nic Cage plays the character, I think. I wonder if Gabe Polsky wanted to make this because he was like “well, I have a lot of experience shooting ice...”

“Crumb Catcher” definitely sounds like a your mom-based insult. It’s not a stop-motion animated film, though the poster could be a little confusing in that regard.

A newlywed couple is held captive in a remote lake house by a maniacally optimistic inventor and his sour wife who are desperate to finance his dream project with a half-baked blackmail plot. [IMDB]

It’s produced by “Chadd Harbold,” which is a name that sounds like it should be on the fake Teen Roast poster alongside Curbes Lurb and Chris Del Chris.

Between the image, the title, and the tagline, I’m getting that this is a documentary about deep sea mining. So I suppose the poster completed the assignment. Jason Momoa narrating is another good selling point. It’s adorable when he’s serious!

I’m still trying to figure out what “a visual whiplash” is.

She looks like she’s about to brain herself with an axe, and, yes, you have my attention. I keep scrolling back and forth in anticipation.

As alluded to, here we have the trailer for Dream Scenario. Once again, Nicolas Cage owns his baldness. That alone is so shocking to the general populous that the poster whites out virtually everything else. The entire draw is “Nicolas Cage looking sort of normal!”

At this point, everyone who reads This Week In Movie Posters knows how annoyed I get with mismatched faces and names in posters. But it’s one thing if the names are like “Anne Hathaway, Al Pacino, Viola Davis.”

Most of the time we can do the math, and I’m just being nitpicky about it. This time around I genuinely don’t know which one is Drew Starkey and which one is Archie Reneaux. It feels like they’re goading me into doing race science to try to figure it out. Meanwhile Zoey here (I assume) is doing modified Dreamworks Face. Is this French-Canadian? Something about this smells French-Canadian.

Zoey Miller, a super smart computer nerd who is uninterested in romantic love, has her life turned upside down when Zack, the school's soccer star, gets amnesia and mistakes Zoey for his girlfriend. [IMDB]

Hm, well, nothing to indicate that it’s French-Canadian so far. Maybe I got thrown off by all the wool? C’mon, guys, one fuzzy sweater per crew.

I genuinely think most of the people who work at Nickelodeon should be in prison.

All of the Killers Of The Flower Moon posters so far have sold the “De Niro and DiCaprio frowning like they’ve just been told to eat their vegetables” angle, so this is certainly a departure. I’m not really getting Scorsese movie from this imagery. Amber waves of grain? Put his palm against the stocks and throw some Sigur Ros in here and this is basically a Terrence Malick movie. (I don’t know what to link to explain this joke so consider it a little treat for the true cinephiles).

Oh yeah, now we’re talking. They definitely didn’t have to remind me of There Will Be Blood to get me to see a Scoresese movie but it sure doesn’t hurt. I guess globs of crude oil are my version of sparks.

“Every story has its origin.”

Yes, if the past ten years of IP-driven filmmaking have taught us anything it’s that. Shout out to Patton Oswalt for nailing this phenomenon a full 15 years ago.

“Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor” (I had to check IMDB to see where the colon went) sounds like the heading of a legal document.

I know “D-Box” is a theater format where your chair vibrates, but I choose to read this in Jamaican patois nonetheless. “Weet-ness every trap in d box, mon! BUH! BUH!”

What was I saying about Nickelodeon? I remember thinking Good Burger was dumb as hell even when I was in middle school, never did imagine that I’d one day see my stepson watching it multiple times with his friends on cable. (The Abe Vigoda parts were kind of funny, I’ll give them that). The original also had a Less Than Jake song on the soundtrack. If they succeed in bringing back ska, all is forgiven.

(Sidenote: this quote about ska sounding like what plays in a middle schooler’s head when he gets extra mozzarella sticks goes viral every six months or so, and to everyone who laughs at it just know that it was a Dave Thomason bit).

Three! Three Trolls movies! What a time to be alive.

I honestly don’t know what it is about Caleb Landry Jones’s face, but even in drag I can take one look at it and the connection to “Dogman” feels self-explanatory. Even without a single feature I could identify as specifically canine he has an ineffable dog-like quality to him.

Speaking of dog men, every person in this poster for Miranda’s Victim look like a confused doggy. Luke Wilson always kind of looks like that, but everyone else in this does too. Gotta switch up the facial expressions a little.

I don’t know who that guy on the left is, he looks like James Franco’s Clark Kent.

Hey, you guys liked The Hunger Games, right? Well, what if we ran it back, this time with Vest Vestman as Jennifer Lawrence, the girl from West Side Story with puffy sleeves, a girl with no eyebrows as Elizabeth Banks, and Jason Schwartzman’s Salvador Dali mustache as Futurebeard? No? Well, what if we also threw in Peter Dinklage and some sparks?

By the way, how do you pronounce “Blyth?” Is it different than Blythe? In my head it’s pronounced “blith,” like it has a built-in lisp.

I absolutely love this poster for Last Stop Larrimah, which may feature the world’s most redundant Australian flag. What’s going on with the two guys center left, are they trying to make the casual minidress for men happen? I think I could actually get down with that, it looks comfortable as hell.

I’m posting the trailer for this one, solely because it looks incredible.

I don’t know why there aren’t ten horror movies set in single-pub towns in the Australian Outback in the 80s.

I’m still probably not going to see the tenth Saw movie, but the posters are cool as hell.

Did the devil do it? Since this is apparently a documentary, I’m going to say… no? The devil was framed, man.

Jesus. I saw the trailer for this last week, and while I have generally positive feelings about Bill Burr, if your script has a joke about someone using a flip phone in it, in a story set in 2023, you should probably throw it in the trash. This poster isn’t doing it many favors either. What’s the brick background accomplishing here? Did an old dad design the poster too?

Also why do the old dads all look like they had a professional stylist? I’m kind of an old dad. We mostly dress like John Fetterman.

No longer in drag, still looks like a dog man!

“The Greatest Mystery In Sports History.”

I really hope the “mystery” isn’t him retiring at 31. He played for a dogshit team with shitty management and probably wanted to still be able to walk and eat solid food when he was 50? Doesn’t seem like much of a mystery!

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