I'm Not Even Done With His Half of Travolta/Cage But I'm Missing Travolta's Terrible Movies Already — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

When I was conceptualizing the Travolta/Cage podcast I made what now appear to be two fairly vast miscalculations. I went in seeing John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as actors with roughly equivalent legacies who made more or less the same amount of movies, namely a fuck-ton.

I was wrong! I was very wrong on both counts. Years into this wonderful, mildly masochistic journey it is achingly obvious that Nicolas Cage is clearly the greater actor, movie star and icon. It’s not even close! Cage is one of the greatest, most daring and beloved actors ever to grace the silver screen, whereas Travolta is handsome man with a lot of charm and talent who unfortunately is not on the same evolutionary plane as his Face/Off costar, who inhabits a mystical, magical realm accessible only to geniuses and madmen.

I’m not entirely sure why I assumed that Cage and Travolta made a similar number of films when a quick trip to IMDB could have disabused me of that notion.

Cage has appeared in 109 movies over the course of his long and legendary career while Travolta has appeared in a relatively paltry 86.

That means that Cage has appeared in twenty-three more movies than Travolta. We consequently will end the Travolta half of our adventure fairly soon but have plenty of ground left to cover with Cage.

I assumed that Travolta, like Cage, had been insanely prolific over the past decade in the grubby world of RedBox-friendly direct-to-streaming movies. But where Cage has been known to crank out six movies in a year, the most Travolta can mange is two or three.

I just made up a list of the line-ups for the next ten episodes of Travolta/Cage. It takes Travolta all the way up to 2018’s Gotti, one of the most recent movies in the Pulp Fiction star filmography, but only up to 2011’s Drive Angry on the Cage side.

To say that Cage has made a lot of movies in the past eleven years would be a wild understatement. And he shows no sign of slowing down.

That means that a day will come soon when we’ll be all out of Travolta movies to cover but will still have over twenty Cage movies left to go.

At that point our John Travolta and Nicolas Cage-themed podcast will become a Nicolas Cage-themed podcast. We’ll either change the name to /Cage or Cage/Cage and start covering two Cage movies per episode.

Deep into Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project I have even more love and respect for Cage than I did going in. Despite my love for the man and his movies, I have discovered, to my horror and mortification, that Travolta has made both more terrible movies than I imagined and that those terrible movies are even worse than I feared.

That said, I am still going to miss watching awful John Travolta movies the way I already miss writing up the movies Bruce Willis released in 2021 for my Talking About Bruno project.

So there’s a distinct element of serendipity in the only upcoming movie on Travolta’s IMDB entry being Paradise City, a direct-to-streaming stinker co-starring, you guessed it, Bruce Willis.

I’m missing Travolta already and I’m not even done with him! Will that still be true after I watch Old Dogs? Probably! I love Travolta in spite of of his choices as well as because of them.

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