Nicolas Cage has never appeared in a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, but he has clearly been paying attention to them. During a recent panel at Fan Expo Dallas, the Oscar winner offered a blunt assessment of the franchise’s creative direction — comparing it to professional wrestling.
“When I see these 50-plus and otherwise intelligent and remarkably gifted thespians putting on these ridiculous outfits and getting ready for the fight — let’s face it, it’s all cutting to the fight — it’s hard for me not to be reminded that the MCU is becoming a well-funded and glorified WWE,” Cage said, according to remarks reported by Breitbart.
He prefaced the shot with a caveat: “I do say this with love.”
The comparison lands at a moment when the phrase “cutting to the fight” has become something of an inside joke among critics of superhero blockbusters. Cage’s point was that the spectacle of costume-clad combat has crowded out nearly everything else in the genre’s recent output, even as the performers inside those costumes rank among the industry’s most acclaimed.
Not a stranger to the cape
Cage’s distance from the MCU is unusual for a star of his generation, but it isn’t because he has avoided superhero material. He headlined 2007’s Ghost Rider and its 2011 sequel, playing Johnny Blaze for Sony. More recently, he starred in Amazon’s Spider-Noir, which the streamer canceled after a single season.
His most famous brush with comic-book lore never made it to screens at all. In the 1990s, Cage was cast as Superman in Tim Burton’s Superman Lives, a project that collapsed during development. The 2015 documentary The Death of Superman Lives turned that failure into a cult subject of its own.
In other words, Cage is not a detached observer lobbing stones from outside the tent. He is someone who has worn the outfit, stood in front of the blue screen, and watched a major studio iteration of a franchise fall apart entirely. His critique carries the weight of experience as much as opinion.
An aging universe tries to restart
The timing of Cage’s comments is hard to ignore. The franchise’s next major tentpole, Avengers: Doomsday, is being positioned as an effort to revive the MCU’s momentum — roughly seven years after what many treated as a definitive conclusion in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
Reviving a story that already had an ending is precisely the pattern Cage seemed to be identifying: sequels, reboots, and rematches without a natural stopping point. Whether audiences experience the new film as a genuine second act or as another round in an open-ended card is the question the studio is betting on.
There is already some evidence that the machinery is straining. Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in the original X-Men films, told Variety recently that he could not follow the story while shooting his scenes for the new film.
“To be honest, I don’t fully understand the plot,” Cumming said, adding that he was not provided with a full screenplay.
He described one of the rare moments when he was on the backlot rather than in front of a blue screen, and a crew member attempted to explain the scene’s context — something about giant robots. Cumming’s response was to wave off the exposition entirely.
“You know what, thank you so much, but just tell me where I point my, whatever I point. And I’ll do that,” he recalled saying. “Really, I just know I’m here to run around.”
A long-building argument
Cage’s WWE line is a pithy version of a criticism that has been building for years: that the connective tissue of a shared cinematic universe, combined with the commercial logic of returning characters and recurring showdowns, has pushed the genre toward a kind of serialized theatrics. In wrestling, the outcome is scripted, the feuds are recycled, and the appeal lies in the spectacle rather than the stakes. That is roughly the charge Cage leveled at Marvel, minus the part about scripts.
What makes the remark notable is who is making it. Cage’s career has been defined by risk — a willingness to take on strange, uncommercial projects and perform them at maximum volume. His recent comeback has included a string of well-received roles that traded on that same instinct. He is, in a sense, the opposite of a franchise player, and his skepticism of the franchise model reads as consistent rather than opportunistic.
He also isn’t alone in voicing it. Cumming’s admission about not understanding the plot of a film he appears in is a different kind of criticism — less about the genre’s direction than about the production process itself, where actors are often working in fragments against green screens with limited information. Taken together, the two comments sketch a portrait of a franchise operating at enormous scale, with performers sometimes serving as components rather than collaborators.
For Marvel, the stakes are concrete. Avengers: Doomsday is not just another entry; it is an attempt to re-establish the cultural gravity the franchise enjoyed during its peak run. If it succeeds, the WWE comparison will look like a cheap shot from an actor who never joined the roster. If it doesn’t, Cage’s convention aside may end up looking less like a quip and more like a diagnosis.
For now, the actor’s verdict stands as one more data point in a broader conversation about what superhero movies have become and whether the formula still has somewhere to go. Cage, for his part, delivered it with the same theatrical conviction he has brought to everything else — and with the caveat that he meant no malice by it.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/10/03/nicolas-cage-says-the-marvel-cinematic-universe-has-become-a-glorified-wwe/