They got Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall and Morgan Freeman for a total that cheap, and they still lost money?! That boggles the mind!
Is it that they were miscast, or is it because the entire movie just truly reeked?
For 1990 a $47 million budget was relatively respectable. Dick Tracy also was 47 mil. Of the Top 10 box office films of that year only 3 had budgets greater to that (Total Recall, Die Hard 2). So that makes Bonfire look even worse. Hell, Ernest Goes to Jail made ten million more.
This suggests to me that this was just a bombing bomb that bombed bombly.
Most miscast movie ever:
“Filmed in 1943 on the MGM lot in Culver City, CA, the film features an unusual assortment of non-Asian actors with odd accents playing Chinese and Japanese: Russian-born and Stanislavski-trained Akim Tamiroff as Wu Lien; Turhan Bey, Viennese born son of a Turkish father and Czechoslovakian mother as the middle son, Lao Er Tan; New England patrician Katharine Hepburn as his wife; American Aline MacMahon–no longer one of the wisecracking Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)–as the wife of Ling Tang; English-born Henry Travers (best remembered as Clarence the Angel from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) as the Third Cousin”; Irish-American J. Carrol Naish as the Japanese Kitchen Overseer; and finally Jewish Robert Lewis, co-founder of the Actors Studio and Meryl Streep’s teacher at the Yale Drama School, as Japanese Capt. Sato."
Micky Rooney in “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”.
Breakfast at Mr. Yunioshi’s - YouTube
What makes the movie a shame is that the book of Bonfire was a biting critique of the 80s culture of self-centeredness.
And many of us read it in a unique way: Rolling Stone magazine ran it as a serial, a chapter each issue for 27 weeks.
When the book came out, I was shocked. The book (that we thought we’d already read) was very different. Wolfe had basically rewritten it before the hardcover was published.
And then when I heard they cast… Tom Hanks?!? This is the character who opens the book by feeling threatened by two black kids, and one of them ends up killed by his car. Sherman McCoy is “hemorrhaging cash”, willing to go broke just to keep up the appearance of wealth. Oh, and has been cheating on his wife for years.
Very Tom Hanks… sheesh. They had Bruce Willis on set, even he would’ve made a better McCoy.
Re: Bonfire, didn’t like the book much and the movie was much worse. I don’t think anything was left of the characters to properly cast them.
The most miscast movie of all time was the 2006 Dead or Alive movie which was an adaption of the 2000’s era fighting video game. Literally the thing that made the games famous was the bounce physics, and how all the female characters had really big boobs to highlight those bounce physics.
So who do they cast in the movie? All hot models, but notably American models with small breasts because they’re traditional Western models. And they still tried to market the movie on cleavage and boob shots, despite the fact their actresses were lacking in that department.
Huh. I read the Rolling Stone serialization. I didn’t realize Wolfe rewrote it for publication.
This is a parody post?
My God! 
As I pointed out in another thread, the movie Genghis Khan from 1965 had a remarkable cast – not a single person of Asian ancestry in the lot (you could argue that Omar Sharif’s ancestors were Asian, but, come on)
Twenty one years after Dragon Seed, but the same casting prejudices.
When Nicholas Meyer made Judge Dee and the Haunted Monastery for TV in 1974, only nine years later, he made sure of a completely Asian cast. Except, that is, for Khigh Dhiegh, who played the lead. (But that I can understand – Kenneth Dickerson (his real name) had made a career of playing Asian characters, most notably the Red Chinese agent Wo Fat on TV’s Hawaii Five-0. I didn’t realize that he was actually Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese until the Internet came around.)
The earlier British TV adaptation of Judge Dee used . I think, all British actors, including Timothy Dalton.
Or Keanu Reeves as John Constantine. A character whose appearance was originally based on the singer Sting. An Englishman wearing a rumpled tan trench coat and loose tie. It’s an iconic character.
And we ended up with this.
They also turned him into a monster hunter using holy gadgets more than a sorcerer/con artist. His attitude was totally wrong too. He was just a grumpy Keanu Reeves rather than a cynical charming schemer.
And I read the hardcover and didn’t much care for it. If the serialization was from a more satirical angle, the story could have worked. The book seemed to play it fairly straightforwardly IIRC, and it was offputting and unfunny.
I liked the movie Constantine, but I never read the comic. The movie worked on its own premises for me.
That’s kind of how I felt about it too when the movie was the first exposure to the character. But after reading some of the comics, and seeing Matt Ryan’s portrayal (fantastic if you ask me), Keanu’s is portrayal is good, but someone other than the classic John Constantine. Kind of an alternate universe John Constantine maybe.
Exactly.
I actually liked the film Constantine and I even like the idea of a sequel. But that’s not DC’s John Constantine. It’s inspired by him, maybe.
And Matt Ryan’s portrayal is spot on.
My Fair Lady had the same problem. Julie Andrews didn’t have enough star power. Audrey Hepburn, as it turns out, COULD sing (e.g. Moon River in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) though she did not have the vocal range to do the entire job.
And numerous other films, especially in the 40s, where so-and-so was a star. and thus had to sing whether she could do so or not. Betty Grable in several films, though at least she was on key - just not particularly good. Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again - actively BAD (Madeleine Kahn’s Lili von Stupp was clearly a send-up of that role, in Blazing Saddles).
It all kept Marni Nixon gainfully employed for years and years.
She also hosted a kids’ TV show in Seattle for awhile.
Lots of movies did this. As Gyrate noted, it virtually gave Marni Nixon a cinematic career – she dubbed a lot of famous actress’ singing voices, starting in 1948. Many more than I had been aware of before I looked up her career on WikipediaShe did appear as herself a couple of times (I think the only one I saw her in was The Sound of Music)
Reportedly, Jack L. Warner got so much flack for recasting Hepburn in My Fair Lady instead of Julie Andrews that he had the original Broadway cast of 1776 play the parts in the movie. That may be (although it’s a long tiime between My Fair Lady in 1964 and 1776 in 1972), but I’m glad he did it – I saw the Broadway production and liked the cast.
But the same year someone else made Man of La Mancha, with that inappropriate cast (and while the original actors were not only available, but had been poised to play their roles when a film production was first discussed). That’s why I had to bring up Man of la Mancha as a particularly egregious example.
Hah - we love the movie. I never saw it on Broadway though my husband did, when he was a child. It’s another example of actors having to sing, who clearly had no talent for it - William Daniels (John Adams) was not off-key or anything, but clearly he is not the greatest singer in the world.
John Cullum, on the other hand, could carry a tune quite well.