Is Nic Cage the Best Coppola?
The Coppola’s are one of the most important families in the history of American film. How does actor Nicolas Cage, born Nicolas Kim Coppola, compare to the filmmaking side of the family, Francis Ford and Sofia?
Who are the Coppola’s?
Their legacy begins with Francis Ford making his directorial debut in 1962, 10 years before making the film that would establish him as one of the greatest filmmakers- The Godfather (1972). He has directed 26 films to-date, 3 of which are often cited as the best movies of all time.
As Francis Ford quit directing to focus on personal, experimental films in the late 1990’s, paving the way for his daughter, Sofia, to enter Hollywood as the next great Coppola director in 1999 with The Virgin Suicides. Sofia Coppola is the first American woman (as well as the fourth American filmmaker) to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and the second woman to win ‘Best Director’ at the Cannes Film Festival.
Who is Nick Cage?
Nephew of Francis Ford, Nic Cage has become one of the most flamboyant and controversial American actors since the beginning of his career in 1981. He has since acted in at least 113 films, ranging from mainstream, blockbuster hits to obscure indie movies. Cage describes his acting style as ‘German expressionism’ for his deliberate exaggeration of emotion, and is known for his extreme method acting.
Although I am curious to see how Nic Cage compares to his family, I also expect my analysis to shed some light on Cage’s very different career-path. Francis Ford and Sofia have quite small filmographies, although they are frequently credited as screenwriters and producers. They insist on taking creative control over the entire filmmaking process, a method proven successful by their awards and accolades. Cage, on the other hand, seems to accept any role he’s offered. His method acting is likely inspired by his uncle, The Godfather star: Marlon Brando. Cage once had two teeth removed without anesthesia to prepare for his role in Birdy (1984). While filming Vampires Kiss (1988), he requested to have hot yogurt poured on his toes to get excited for a sex scene. Although his unusual methods are frequently ridiculed, he has proven to be one of the most fascinating thespians of modern time
Francis Ford left Hollywood because of what he called “factory films.” He did not care for superheroes or digital effects, preferring live-action effects or in-camera illusions on analog film. Nicolas Cage exemplifies his uncle’s artistic principles, working with numerous of Francis Ford’s peers — Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Spike Jonze. Perhaps, Roger Ebert sums it up the best:
“There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He’s daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air. No one else can project inner trembling so effectively…. He always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience. He is committed to the character with every atom and plays him as if he were him.”
So, is Nic Cage the best Coppola?
The Data:
The first dataset I sourced was a collection of over 85,000 films from 1974-present scraped from IMDb. The data included the film title, director, a breakdown of the IMDb rating (1–10), and gross income. The second dataset I used was a CSV of Nic Cage films, including the title and release year.
Because the IMDb dataset was so large, I made two new, roughly cleaned datasets and uploaded them to GitHub. For the Cage dataset, I merged his film titles with the IMDb data. Since the directors were already included in the IMDb dataset, I easily created the Coppola dataset when [‘director’] contained ‘Coppola’.
The Process:
IMDb Rating-
I first wanted to compare the proportion of each datasets ratings. Each column was summed to get the cumulative count for the rating, creating two new series for Cage and Coppola, with the rating as the index. To control for Cage’s much larger filmography and more easily compare between the two, I divided each series by the total votes. After combining the two series into a dataframe, I was able to easily compare the two distributions.
Total Gross Income-
Next, I wanted to look at how well Cage and Coppola films did in the box office. I began by filtering my original dataframes by year, USA gross income, and worldwide gross income. I removed the dollar signs from the rows, turned the year into a date-time object, and created a new column for the total income.
The Results:
Of 6,751,602 votes for 97 films, Nic Cage’s rating weighted average was 6.84/10. The Coppola’s weighted average was 8.25/10, a total of 5,005,141 votes across 29 films.
As told by the pie chart above, the Coppola’s received about 9% more 10-ratings than Cage. After performing a two-sample hypothesis test, the p-value was calculated as 0.077. The results are not significantly significant, so I cannot conclude that Nicolas Cage is the best Coppola.
Looking at the average count per movie, it is clear Coppola movies have much more reviews than Cage’s, despite having a much smaller sample size.
Not every movie in the original datasets had information on the income, so the sample size was much smaller, Cage having 66 films and the Coppola’s having 21. I will note here that IMDb only uses a film’s theatrical release when calculating the U.S and worldwide gross income, and it does not account for inflation or variations in ticket price.
Nic Cage’s mean was $134,977,643 and the Coppola’s was $87,568,641 for total gross income. Just looking at the graph and means, it seems like Cage is the clear winner; however, the two-sample hypothesis test returns a high p-value of 0.669. Again, I fail to conclude that Nicolas Cage is the best Coppola.
As shown above, Nic Cage’s gross income is heavily influenced by his breadth of work, but still has numerous films that flopped.
Conclusion:
Though I was unable to prove Nicolas Cage is the best Coppola, my analysis still shares some interesting insights into the family’s differing approaches to film. A prolific filmography, does not prove to be as fruitful as one would think. It’s easier to improve one’s average rating by making better films, as exemplified the mantra: Quality over quantity.
Even without controlling for inflation and ticket prices, or factoring in syndication, Cage still could not pull a significant p-value because he had so many outliers. Vengeance: A Love Story (2017) returned only $4,526 of gross income in the United States, whereas one year later Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) returned $190,241,310. Nic Cage’s career has been a constant seesaw from blockbuster to bust.
Francis Ford Coppola is inarguably one of the best directors of all time, starting a family dynasty with his children, nieces, and nephews all following in his footsteps. In 1986, Cage starred in Peggy Sue Got Married, directed by his uncle, and took it upon himself to only speak in a falsetto, an artistic choice he refused to change even when Coppola threatened to fire him. Nic Cage may never match his uncle’s critical acclaim, but maybe that’s never been his goal. Cage’s unapologetic approach to acting and life in general has captured the meme zeitgeist of the 21st century, ushering in a new generation of forward thinking artists.
