Roger Ebert once put forth these 2 rules of filmmaking. Please forgive any unintended misquote.
•It’s just as hard to make a bad movie as a good movie.
•Nobody sets out to make a bad movie.
Yeah, great cast. Tim Currey was fantastic it it. I’d say he’s pretty fantastic in everything. I thought the alternate ending thing was pretty interesting too.
Going back awhile and trying to stay with the topic, who decided to Greenlight Popeye back in 1980? I mean, someone had to say 'we’re going to use characters from the old “Thimble Theater” comics and make Popeye like the cartoons of the 1930’s and 1940’s and he hates spinach right until the end." And yet someone decided to spend the money for it and in general, while it made money, it was generally panned by critics.
Truth-telling, I was aware of the backstory and the oldest cartoons and enjoyed the movie, but still, buying into that idea was not the greatest decision in history.
FWIW my late wife loved the Popeye movie.
Popeye was damn near a perfect movie pitch. Start with the success of Annie and the fact that Paramount already owned the movie rights to its own stable of comics characters. Sign Robin Williams, the hottest thing in show business at the time. Jules Feiffer writes the script, Robert Altman directs, and you surround Williams with note-perfect character actors like Ray Walston and Shelley Duvall (who had just finished making The Shining.)
Sure, the production was a disaster and the finished movie was, shall we say, uneven, but it did gross $60 million on a $20 million budget, so you can’t fault Paramount for greenlighting it.
Simple.
Forrest Gump.
Jaws 4: The Revenge was better written.
What soulless fuck was responsible for the utter creative bankruptcy of The Emoji Movie?
Forrest Gump was an incredible success and doesn’t belong here.
Incredible Success doesn’t mean every single frame sucked. What a Crap Movie. Bouy by the soundtrack and stock images.
Locrian nailed it.
$217 million of box office, plus streaming, and a budget of $50 million. That’s not creative bankruptcy, that’s financial genius.
The problem, I think, was the bizarre choice to have Altman direct - the man was a genius, don’t get me wrong, but he was utterly wrong for the material. I could hardly imagine a director working in 1980 whose sensibilities were so incompatible with the concept a Popeye film; it would even have been better if Stanley Kubrick or Bernardo Bertolucci had directed.
Everyone says that Heaven’s Gate is the movie that killed the “Let the genius director do what he wants!” era of Hollywood, but I suspect Popeye helped.
“Forrest Gump” is perhaps the worst answer given so far. It won Best Picture, IMDB voters have collectively rated it the #12 move and it made $678 million. Whoever greenlit it was a genius.
Why do people here continue to think that just because they don’t like a film most other people do, that it was a mistake to make it?
Yes it is. I don’t care how much money it made, it’s a movie about EMOJIS.
Amen.
ETA on top of that, since this is specifically about green lighting of films, even if a film sucked, if it made a lot of money, it’s going to get greenlit.
Ishtar was a notorious bomb. Big-name stars in Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, big-name screenwriter and director in Elaine May. But it cost $51 million to make and made only $14.4 million at the box office. The movie is widely ridiculed as having a ridiculous story, bad dialog, and stupid scenes of Beatty and Hoffman crawling through the desert. An expensive mess.
There’s a handful of sequels to great comedy movies that obviously got greenlit solely on the originals name. The results however were so awful the label “shitshow” doesn’t begin to describe them.
Caddyshack 2
Zoolander 2
Hot Tub Timemachine 2
So many middle-of-the-night-wtf-did-I-just watch? movies. Two that come immediately to mind–
The Kidnapping: Fireman on a depressive bender in Mexico (I think) is kidnapped and forced to fight in rooster fights streamed on “the dark web” were rich people bet on the outcome. It is run by Samuel L Jackson and is a gazillion times weirder than any short description I can write.
Strangeland-- Body horror movie written by and starring Dee Snider from Twisted Sister. Just. . . why?
National Lampoons Dirty Movie.
The skits played like “You can’t do that on Television” which would have been appealing had the jokes been really filthy and actually funny and not cornball dreck I heard in 7th grade. An hour and a half of groaning.
In fact a lot of stuff from NL has been pig slop the last few decades.
I feel obligated to mention the podcast that covers this subject.
Highlander II: The Quickening