Tiger King: The Internet Is Flipping Out Over Nicolas Cage Being Cast as Joe Exotic

On Monday, news broke that Nicolas Cage will play Joe Exotic in a new scripted television series. Exotic was made famous by the Netflix documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. He’ll now by the subject of an eight-episode limited series produced by Imagine Television Studios and CBS Television Studios. The series will be based on the Texas Monthly article “Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild” by Leif Reigstad. Casting a cult favorite actor like Cage, known for his ability to go weird with eccentric characters, and the eccentric if not deranged Exotic is eliciting some interesting responses from folks online. We’ve gathered some of them here.

The series will tell the story Joe Exotic, born Joe Schreibvogel, and now legally named Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage. Maldonado-Passage was convicted in 2019 on 17 charges of animal abuse, plus two counts of murder for hire for his plot to kill Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin. Now he’s in a federal prison serving his 22-year sentence.

Maldonado-Passage’s story has been covered on several podcasts, but he reached a new level of fame through Netflix’s docuseries. This isn’t the only scripted adaptation of his story that’s in the works. In addition to the CBS series with Cage, Kate McKinnon is producing a limited series based on the Wondery podcast Over My Dead Body‘s telling of the events, with herself playing Baskin. American Crime Story‘s Ryan Murphy is in talks to created a scripted limited series for Netflix. Rob Lowe is rumored to play Exotic in that adaptation.

Keep reading to see how the internet is reacting to the news.

Photo by Sascha Steinbach/Getty Images

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