In what many in Hollywood are calling Nicolas Cage’s best career move in ages, the Oscar-winning actor has fired 12-year-old Joey Thompson, a sixth grade student, who has been in charge of picking Cage’s film roles for the last several years.

Cage decided to ax the youngster, a student at Glenwood Elementary School in Los Angeles, after his latest film “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” struggled at the box office and was critically panned, receiving a rating of just 15 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” was the latest in a long string of box office and critical failures for Cage during Thompson’s tenure picking his movies, that included “Trespass,” “Season of the Witch,” “Drive Angry,” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

For years, numerous rumors have circulated through Hollywood about how Cage actually picks his movie roles, each one seemingly worse than its predecessor. The most popular theory suggested that the actor, while blindfolded, threw darts at scripts taped to a wall — whichever one he hit would be his next project. Others suggested that whenever Cage was offered numerous scripts to consider, the actor, who hates to read, simply picked the shortest one.

But it wasn’t until early this week that Cage finally admitted that he had enlisted the aid of the sixth grader to help pick his films.

The eccentric actor felt that a 12-year-old was the only person with the skills to fully understand him and his child-like personality and interests. Cage famously spent a $276,000 on a dinosaur skull, once owned a $1.6 million comic book collection, and named his son Kal-El, after Cage’s hero, Superman.

Industry insiders said that the 12-year-old and CAA, the agency that represents Cage constantly clashed over the direction of his career.

One CAA agent told Hollywood & Swine, “He was offered ‘The Descendants’ and ‘Safe House,” but that sixth grader kept telling Nick they sounded lame, so he passed. Honestly, I’m not even sure that kid could read.”