Cage declared bankruptcy in 2009, and to this day is desperately appearing in any movie script Hollywood craps out in an attempt to stay ahead of his debts.
Cage appears to make financial decisions by holding up a small handheld mirror and asking himself: "What would Nicolas Cage do?" Over the years, he has purchased a haunted murder mansion, a private island, and a collection of shrunken heads. But his crowning achievement was spending $276,000 on a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skull which turned out to be stolen.
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Get it? "Crowning"? Because it's a skull? Okay, I'll move on.
Authorities discovered that the gallery where Mr. Cage bought the skull had been scammed by criminal paleontologist Eric Prokopi, whom authorities describe as a "one-man black market in prehistoric fossils." Holy shit, Hollywood, you're still making terrible remakes of even more terrible 1990s book series when this guy is walking around with his story untold?
Cage returned the skull to its home country of Mongolia, but never revealed exactly what he wanted it for in the first place. The only reason I can think of is that he wanted to grind up the bones and ingest the powder in some sort of voodoo ritual to give himself mystical dinosaur powers and wisdom, but that's completely crazy shit that even Nicolas Cage wouldn't be into -- wait, Nicolas Cage is into that, too? Okay.
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