A Sinkhole Swallowed Nicolas Cage’s $10.5 Million Malibu Driveway, and Now He’s Racing to Save the Whole House

At around 5:45 on the morning of September 8, the ground in front of Nicolas Cage’s Malibu beach house simply gave way. There was no earthquake, no warning. Just the sound of a 30 foot wide crater opening up where his driveway used to be, swallowing asphalt, a privacy fence, a portable toilet and a few ladders like the Pacific Ocean had decided it wanted the whole street for itself.

A month later, the hole has only gotten bigger. And Cage, 62, is now in a full blown fight with the city of Malibu, Mother Nature and the calendar to keep his $10.5 million mansion from following the driveway into the earth.

The Morning the Ocean Took His Driveway

The sinkhole opened on Sea Level Drive, the private gated road in western Malibu where Cage’s four level cliff top mansion sits above the water. At first it measured about 30 feet by 30 feet, which is already the size of a small house footprint. By the evening of the same day, officials estimated it had grown to between 25 and 30 feet deep and 60 feet across.

Photos taken days later showed the crater had wrapped around the side of the $10.5 million beachfront home and stretched right up to the front door. The driveway was completely gone. There was no way to reach the garage or the entrance anymore.

The collapse also tore through the sole entry and exit road of the enclave. When the ground dropped, it snapped a natural gas line beneath the street. The Los Angeles County Fire Department rushed to the scene just before 6 a.m., SoCal Gas cut service to the whole street, and firefighters stayed to deal with the leak.

The suspected culprit? Powerful surf and coastal erosion driven by the remnants of Hurricane Marie, which had been pounding the California coast for days. City officials warned at the time that more high tides and rain were forecast and that conditions could keep getting worse.

Thirty One Homes Ordered Out

This was never just one celebrity’s bad morning. Within hours, the city of Malibu declared a local emergency. A mandatory evacuation order went out, and all 31 homes on Sea Level Drive were red tagged as unsafe.

The problem was bigger than the hole itself. Sea Level Drive has a single entry and exit, and the collapsed roadway blocked it completely. That meant fire crews, sheriff’s deputies and ambulances could not reach any of the 31 properties if something else went wrong.

“The collapse of a beachfront driveway extended into the roadway, blocking resident and emergency access. Sea Level Drive has a single entry and exit,” the city explained at the time.

The American Red Cross opened a temporary shelter at Malibu High School for displaced residents. Fortunately, no injuries were reported anywhere on the street.

Cage’s Battle Plan to Save the Mansion

Cage, who mostly lives in Nevada, was not believed to be inside the Malibu home when the sinkhole formed. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment, and he has not publicly addressed the disaster.

But behind the scenes, he moved fast. Within days of the sinkhole opening, Cage filed three permits with city officials, according to an exclusive report by Page Six this week.

The first was an emergency building permit that gave him permission to pack sandbags against the beach and the exterior of the home, for both wave protection and to slow further coastal erosion. The other permits covered removing asphalt debris so crews could install shoring and excavate to collect soil samples and figure out exactly how unstable the ground is.

The homeowners association started repairs with city permits almost immediately. Reports estimated the work would take about five weeks to complete, which means the crews are likely still on site this month.

The property itself is no small stake. Cage took over the 4,000 square foot Malibu home in 2024. It comes with a rooftop deck, private beach access and sweeping ocean views, the kind of four level cliff top spread that normally sells itself on permanence. When he bought it, the ocean view was the entire point. This month, that view is the problem.

While the Ground Caved In, He Kept Showing Up

Despite everything happening at his house, Cage has kept his public schedule running like nothing is wrong. On September 19, less than two weeks after the sinkhole opened, he walked the opening night of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art alongside his wife, Riko Shibata, 31.

Then on October 10 he appeared at New York Comic Con for a spotlight panel, where he refused to sign an AI waiver for an Amazon project and teased his True Detective role. Not a single word about the sinkhole in public.

Why This Is Bigger Than One Driveway

Cage’s street is a star studded one. His neighbors on that stretch of Malibu coast reportedly include Pierce Brosnan and Dustin Hoffman, which means one collapsed driveway shut down some of the most expensive real estate in America.

And the pressure on this coastline keeps building. The area was already one of the worst hit by the Palisades fire in early 2025, and the piling environmental disasters are starting to change how the stars who live there think. Brosnan and his wife Keely Shaye Brosnan have begun talking about spending more time in her native Hawaii. “We’ve been spared by the fires a few times now. But I think it’s time to move,” Brosnan said in an interview with The Times. “We live by this body of earth’s water on a fault in a ring of earthquakes. That creates a fear.”

For Cage, the fight is not over. Sandbags, shoring and soil tests can only do so much against an ocean that keeps rising. His $10.5 million investment is now quite literally a race between repair crews and the next big tide.

Money can buy a lot of things in Malibu. Solid ground, it turns out, is not always one of them.

Further reading: Jared Leto just sold his secret Air Force compound for $12 million | George Clooney broke his silence while hosting the Albies in Malibu

Sources: Page Six (exclusive, Oct 14), Entertainment Weekly (Sept 2026), Los Angeles Times, city of Malibu emergency proclamation.