Do You Remember: Nicolas Cage’s Dinosaur Skull

Hollywood’s most beloved weirdo went on the wildest shopping spree ever.

At one point in his career, Nicolas Cage was listed by Forbes as one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, earning a reported $40 million in 2009 alone. While he already had an Oscar on his shelf and a slew of commercial hits, in that era he was mostly making action shlock and an assembly line of titles that were nigh-on indistinguishable from one another. There were exceptions, like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but there was also this sense in the industry and among critics that his best days were behind him. It's around this time that Cage became a meme, more known to the public as an overacting weirdo than a man who took his craft very seriously. We've mercifully moved beyond the tedious "Is Nic Cage a bad actor, actually" discourse, and Cage has embraced a lot of the lore surrounding himself. That wasn't the case in the mid-2000s when he was on one of the most committed shopping sprees the world has ever seen.

Cage liked to buy lavish properties and rare memorabilia. He bought castles in England and Germany. He owned what he claimed to be the most haunted house in America, the LaLaurie House in New Orleans once owned by a serial killer who tortured enslaved people (and inspired a Kathy Bates character in American Horror Story: Coven.) A die-hard Superman fan who named his son Kal-El, Cage also owned a copy of Action Comics #1. Cage is basically a magpie for expensive oddities, whether it's yachts, jewellery, a pyramid tomb, or, yes, a dinosaur skill.