Jennifer Aniston was pretty clear in her feelings about Rumor Has It. I think she’s had some public regrets about Derailed as well.
Because the other half of that box office goes to the distributor (the theater chains) and not to the studios at all. Their calculation means to factor in the fact that not every $ that comes in in receipts automatically goes to paying back the cost of the film itself.
I read an excerpt from a book on celebrities some years ago. Dennis Hopper was talking about his role in Mario Brothers: The Movie. It went something like:
Hopper’s son: Dad, why did you make this movie?
Hopper: Well, so I could have money to you buy you shoes, and things like that.
Son (after thinking about this): Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly.
Pity I could not fit this bit into the title of this thread “while the movie is in general release”
I also saw Sylvester Stallone pull out $10 and hand it out to a few people who claimed to have seen “Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot!” on a talk show a few months ago.
Doesn’t matter. I have yet to hear somebody say about a live-action film “Hey, United Artists has a new film out! I’m gonna go see that for sure.” Or, “There’s a 24-hour Gigli marathon at CinePlex! I hate that movie, but I’ll look for any reason to go sit in the CinePlex for hours on end, so I’m gonna go see it!”
Similarly, not everyone who goes to see a film cares much about who’s in it, although that definitely has more of an impact than which studio produced it or which theatre is showing it. For those reasons, I find the entire “overpaid stars” article Forbes did ridiculous, and their formula rationalizations even more so.
I must really like crap films because not only did I like Hudson Hawk I liked Super Mario Brothers too. The casting was superb - Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the Marios, Dennis Hopper chewing the scenery, Fiona Shaw in yet another ridiculous character (seriously - the woman is a phenomenal actress and plays nothing but outrageously OTT women on film: see also Three Men and a Little Lady, Undercover Blues etc). It’s not good but it’s darned entertaining.
On the other hand I did not, and will not ever, like The Avengers.
I liked Hudson Hawk too, and I went to Gigli just to see what all the fuss was about. It wasn’t good but I didn’t find it to be unbearable either.
The guy who directed American History X, Tony Kaye, reportedly hated the final cut of the movie (after Ed Norton re-edited it) so much that he wanted to use the pseudonym Humpty Dumpty in the credits, and trashed it in every interview he did.
I believe George Clooney also likes to joke about Ocean’s Twelve. At least I recall that when launching Ocean’s Thirteen, he said they couldn’t let the series end on a bad note, or something to the effect.
Guess that means there is an Ocean’s 14 in his future.
I wonder which version I saw then, because that movie was awesome.
In the early 80s HBO played an Olivia Newton John concert where she disses her movie Xanadu. She says something like…“I made a little movie a few years ago called Xanadu, in case you missed it which was very easy to do…etc.” She said that before introducing the song Xanadu which she liked, to
distinguish it from the movie she hated.
Sadly, I love * Death to Smoochy *. A lot.
So much so that when I do the dishes I usually sing ‘Oh the crack can lead to smack, oh yes it can’.
Well, tell that to the studios then, because the only reason the stars are paid as much as they are is not because they’re likeable people or great humanitarians. They are paid what they are because the expectation is that they can bring butts into the seats (and the comparison to studios or theatres is absurd; they’re not even remotely analogous). While it’s true that not everyone makes decisions based on casting, a lot of people do (both positively and negatively)–certainly enough so that the powers that be pay stars what they do because they expect to make their money make and then some based on who they pick to be in their film. As long as that expectation is there, assessing the value of those investments is fair game.
While it’s not a complete trashing of The Covenant, Taylor Kitsch does say: “I think it had the making to be something really great… It just felt like the potential wasn’t 100 percent reached… You can’t win on every single one.”
Don’t let that stop you from trying to prevent a thread from growing organically and becoming entertaining and amusing, when you can insist it stay literal and boring.
ETA: I also heard Syvester Stallone, when told someone was going to rent Oscar, said “Don’t bother; save your money.” But that’s wasn’t in general release either.
In its defence The Covenant had some extremely hot young guys wearing swim suits, so I give it a pass.
Whenever people tell Patty Duke “I saw you in Valley of the Dolls,” her standard response is “Oh, I am so sorry.”
Shirley Ujest you must be thinking of “The Devil’s Own”, in which Pitt costarred with Harrison Ford in an Northern Ireland themed drama. Pitt said in a Newsweek article “We had no script…It was ridiculous. It was the most irresponsible bit of filmaking I’ve ever seen”. He apparently was upset that constant script rewrites had failed to make his character better. He would quickly offer up an apology under studio pressure.