Nic Cage is on a bit of a Western movie kick.
His first-ever Western, The Old Way, premiered earlier this year on Hulu. And now he's back in the Wild West with Butcher's Crossing, which debuts a limited theatrical release on October 20.
Sony Pictures just dropped the official trailer for Butcher's Crossing on YouTube — and it looks poised to deliver a heaping portion of Cage's signature insanity.
The description of the film reads: "Based on the seminal novel by John Edward Williams, Gabe Polsky's epic frontier adventure, Butcher's Crossing is a riveting commentary on human nature, ambition, masculinity, and man's relationship to his natural environment. Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage (1996, Best Actor, Leaving Las Vegas) stars in a gritty story about buffalo hunters in the Old West. Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) has left Harvard to find adventure. He teams up with Miller (Cage), a mysterious frontiersman offering an unprecedented number of buffalo pelts in a secluded valley. Their crew must survive an arduous journey where the harsh elements will test everyone's resolve, leaving their sanity on a knife's edge."
The visually arresting trailer opens with a massive herd of the majestic bison that once dominated the North American plains moving through a mountain pass, a fog of dust enshrouding them. An ominous droning sound builds before being cut off by the snap of Cage's rifle. It is apparent that the film doesn't shy away from the under-told tragedy of the North American bison, which numbered between 30 and 60 million at the start of the 1800s. But as hunters began their mass slaughter, first to eliminate the food source of Native Americans, then to clear the way for railroad tracks and to make a profit off their hides, wild bison had dwindled to a mere 325 by the end of the century. Thanks to conservation efforts that began in the early 1900s, there are around 500,000 bison in the US today.
Cage's Miller — seemingly driven by an insatiable greed, a personal vendetta against buffalo, or perhaps both — is hell-bent on killing as many of them as possible.
"Miller," Fred (Jeremy Bobb) calls out, the men peering over a sea of dead buffalo opposite their smoking rifles. "There's no sense shootin' more than we can skin."
"You will skin them, Fred," Miller says, madness in his eyes. "Or I'll shoot you."
But the other men in the crew grapple with the consequences of their slaughter and fear a reckoning.
Gabe Polsky helms the Saban Films production in his narrative feature film debut. Polsky and Liam Satre Meloy penned the screenplay.
Butcher's Crossing had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2022. On Rotten Tomatoes, 72% of 18 critics gave the film positive reviews.
