Is it really such a surprise Nicolas Cage likes to buy things like dinosaur skulls and pygmy heads and puts them in his castle?

We all know Nicolas Cage has done some weird stuff in the past, but that weirdness also seems to extend to the actor’s purchases as well. While some celebrities have weird fetishes, and some times even stranger collections, Cage just spends all of his money on weird things, for no reason in particular.

With how famous and rich Cage was, there’s no doubt he had the money to splurge like any other celebrity. But as far as his spending goes, he might want to watch out for his $25 million net worth, which is kinda low for an actor of his magnitude. Spending just to spend might not be such a great idea when his career has sort of sunk in recent years.

According to CNBC, Cage had a fortune of $150 million from around 1996 to 2011 but spent most of it by 2009, on useless things. Cage has always been an eccentric sort of guy, so of course, he wanted to surround himself with equally eccentric things. In the end, it bit him in the behind, and he had to foreclose on a lot of his properties and wound up owing the IRS $6.3 million.

But while Cage’s spending sprees are largely over, it’s still interesting to see how extravagantly he lived. He once had 15 homes for himself, some of which included his $25 million home in Newport Beach, California, a $15.7 million estate in Newport, Rhode Island, and an $8.5 million home in Las Vegas.

The Rhode Island estate was purchased as a result of Cage’s real-life quest for the Holy Grail, which took him all around England and ended up with him traveling to Newport. “I don’t know if I’m going to say that’s why I bought the Rhode Island property,” Cage told The New York Times.

“But I will say that is why I went to Rhode Island, and I happened to find the place beautiful. But yes, this had put me on a search around different areas, mostly in England, but also some places in the States. What I ultimately found is: What is the Grail but Earth itself?”

Cage also bought what is to believed to be one of the most haunted houses in America, the LaLaurie mansion in New Orleans, for $3.4 million. And who knows maybe while he was searching for the Grail in England, he wanted to buy some property there as well.

He had two castles in Europe, the first one, Schloss Neidstein in the Oberpfalz region in Germany, the other, Midford Castle in Somerset, England. Cage never slept in the castle, all he ended up doing there was renovating it and later selling it.

The National Treasure actor even owned a couple of private island in the Bahamas for $7 million, his very own Gulfstream jet to get to all these places, which according to Goliath, he was advised not to purchase.
He had nine Rolls-Royce cars, Ferraris, a Lamborghini Miura SVJ, which he bought from the Shah of Iran in 1997 for $450,000, Bentleys and a bunch more. Cage reportedly bought a brand new luxury car every month at one point and hired a mechanic to take care of them for him. He also had four yachts, two of them were called the Weston and Sarita.

No wonder people thought Cage would be perfect to play Joe Exotic, because he’s just as much into dangerous wild animals, having two albino King Cobras, and other pets like a bunch of purebred dogs, rare birds and lizards, and even a pet octopus he paid $150,000 for. In the case of the snakes, he reportedly had “an antidote serum on the wall, so that if you got bit by a snake you could save yourself.”

One of Cage’s bigger ticketed items he’s purchased was a fully intact, 7-million-year-old dinosaur skull for which he paid a grand total of $276,000, and in which he won from a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio.

The skull turned out to be stolen though, and he had to return it to the Mongolian government. Cage even bought the first Superman comic in existence for $3.2 million (it was later stolen from his home in 2000). Cage was even supposed to play Superman in Tim Burton’s reboot that never happened, and he also named his son Kal-El.

Almost as big as the skull, as just as morbid, was another purchase of a huge, nine-foot-tall, white pyramid tomb, he bought in a New Orleans graveyard. When he dies he wishes to be buried there. But the creepiest thing Cage bought had to be the shrunken pygmy heads.

With all these purchases, no wonder Cage was left with a measly fortune. Maybe the Joe Exotic series he’s supposed to star in will do his net worth some good, let’s just hope he doesn’t spend his earning on more stupid stuff. He and Johnny Depp should definitely hang out.