Nicolas Cage Almost Played Sweet Tooth in a Film Adaptation of The Game TWISTED METAL!
I have a lot of fond memories playing Twisted Metal with my brothers on the original PlayStation in the mid-90s. It was just such an incredibly fun game that focused on vehicular combat, which included lots of explosions, gunfire, heavy metal, carnage, and the sounds of roaring motors.
There was actually a movie in development at one point with director Brian Taylor at the helm. He's one of the guys who directed films such as Crank and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengence. Both of those were extremely wild films and he wanted to bring his crazy high-octane style to Twisted Metal and he wanted to bring Nicolas Cage along for the ride. Seems like the perfect combination of talent for a film like Twisted Metal!
When talking about the project in an interview with Collider, Taylor said:
“That was gonna be badass… It’s batshit. It was kind of like Fury Road before Fury Road in a way. The set pieces in Twisted Metal were kind of the same thing."
His version of the film was so big and ambitious, that Sony Pictures wasn't willing to give the film the budget that was needed. They didn't think there was an audience there because of the failure of the video game that was released 2012. The director went on to explain:
“It became like a ‘tweener. Sony came out with a new version of the game, didn’t really sell that well. So they had this property that was kind of like this ‘tweener. It was a movie that felt like it needed to be $50 million, but they didn’t feel that the fanbase really merited that kind of movie; it really wanted to be more of a $15 million movie, but the nature of it with the set pieces would’ve just made it too big.”
Had the film actually got made, Cage would have played Twisted Metal's raging insane mascot, Sweet Tooth.
"I wanted Nic Cage to be Sweet Tooth... Even Sweet Tooth is kind of like the Fury Road guy, you know it’s the mask and the clown with the crazy car. It kind of feels the same..."
Cage as Sweet Tooth seems like complete madness, which is why it would have worked. Unfortunately, he just couldn't get Sony to sign off on his vision for the project, and he wasn't interested in compromising his vision with a drastically lower budget. In regards to that, he says:
“It’s not worth doing it unless you can really push the envelope and do destruction people haven’t seen before. So I don’t know. it’s sort of in movie purgatory, but I tell ya it’s cool.”
It'd certainly be interesting to see Twisted Metal get an insane film adaptation. If it got made, I'd watch the hell out of it! Would you want to see a big screen adaptation of Twisted Metal?