Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller and Kate Mara in Josh Trank's 'Fantastic Four'
The nature of life is that, no matter how hard one may try to avoid it, at some point all of us have blundered royally. Hardly anyone in life really sets out to screw something up. Some are more skilled than others. Some care about the work more than others. And some have different, more selfish goals than others. But
time and chance happeneth to us all and most mistakes are usually the result of people honestly believing their choices were the right ones, no matter how misguided they may have been. And when those mistakes happen in the business world, the result is groups of people sitting in boardrooms thinking
New Coke or the
Edsel were great ideas.
Sometimes the bad movies, TV shows, albums, etc., can be really interesting to analyze, since it's fascinating to wonder how a group of supposedly talented people with lots and lots of resources can mess it up so badly. In this respect, it's almost analogous to how the wheels come off a bad political campaign, where advisers, consultants and media professionals sit in many many meetings wasting money and time shaping a message and "story" that will galvanize the public's interest, and fail spectacularly. Maybe their failure is the result of choices which alienate the fans in their base. Maybe all of the focus grouping and notes become a mess which totally misunderstands the situation. Or maybe everything about both the process and product is flawed and just doesn't work.
Such is the case with the release of Fox's reboot of the Fantastic Four film franchise. Not to put too fine a point on it, the movie is awful to the level of being a horrible debacle. The production, which cost in excess of $130 million, was a massive bomb at the box office over the weekend. Rumors of this movie being troubled have been out there for months, with Fox doing extensive rewrites and reshoots. But sources confirming reports of infighting on the production, with the disagreements running the gamut between almost everyone involved, creeped into the press after director Josh Trank distanced himself from the film.
So this situation got me to thinking about the nature of flops and how they go from merely an unwise financial investment that loses money into a full-fledged fiasco. Which are the most memorable? And what is the most common reason things go off the rails?
Continue below the fold for more.
There have been four films based on the Fantastic Four created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics. A campy and goofy 1994 film, produced by Roger Corman, which was never released and was more or less made by the production company only to retain the intellectual property rights to the characters. By the mid-aughts, 20th Century Fox had acquired the license to the characters and released two Fantastic Four films starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis. Both were seen as mediocre to awful by fans and critics, changing significant aspects about the characters (i.e., Doctor Doom's origin, the nature of Galactus, etc.). While not blockbusters, both films performed reasonably well financially, but there was no real interest in a third film after Rise of the Silver Surfer.
The
newest iteration of the Fantastic Four has been accused as being an "
ashcan copy" like the 1994 film, in order to keep the rights away from Disney and Marvel Studios. The source of the film's problems seem to be the contentious relationship between director Josh Trank, writer/producer Simon Kinberg, and the studio. Fox hired Trank based on the positive critical reception for his debut film,
Chronicle. However, about four months ago,
rumors began to surface of a very troubled production for
Fantastic Four after Trank was (depending on who you believe) ousted or voluntarily decided to leave the directing chair for the
second Star Wars stand-alone film that's rumored to be centered around the life of bounty hunter Boba Fett. According to
media reports, stories of erratic behavior and indecisive performance during the making of
Fantastic Four were getting back to Disney and Lucasfilm, and alarmed them so much they decided to reconsider the directing chair.
Since Fantastic Four was released on Friday, the stories about what was actually happening during the making of the movie have only deepened, with the dam breaking after Trank tweeted and then quickly deleted a message which implied the current film was not his creation. And the picture painted of the production is of a director who was probably not the easiest person to get along with, but also of a studio that micromanaged his every decision and made getting a decent film from the situation next to impossible.
From Anthony Breznican at
Entertainment Weekly:
Several high level sources close to Fantastic Four – spoken to independently of each other – have told EW the rift on set was not about creative differences but rather combative and abusive behavior Trank demonstrated toward the crew, producers, studio and even the stars. It’s partly linked to Trank’s personal disputes – involving accusations of deliberate damage done to the house he was renting, as revenge over a dispite with the landlord – which sources say eventually manifested on set as hostility and frustration from Trank.
Not all these new sources agree, however. Some who worked on the film say Trank broke, for sure, but was driven to the breaking point by the studio, and that his clash was not with Kinberg but Fox production president Emma Watts. According to several individuals who worked on the movie, the studio delayed casting and script approvals, slashed the budget by tens of millions from what was originally promised during the development phase, and tried to force last-minute script changes to the film just as principal photography was beginning ... There was uncertainty about who should star. Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm was set from the start, but the studio wanted a different actor than Miles Teller for Reed Richards. Trank won that battle, even though he later developed a mutually disdainful relationship with the actor – but Fox insisted that Kate Mara be given the role of Sue Storm, and Trank treated her badly as a result. Some say he was cruel, others say merely cold. No one says they got along.
Different sources say Trank was indecisive, others say the studio was hemming and hawing on his choices. Either way, the script was not finalized until late in preproduction, and continued to change right through reshoots, which stalled crew workers who were trying to build sets, make costumes, props, and prep the movie. This created confusion and stress from the get-go that often boiled over among department heads trying to put together pieces of a movie that was still in flux. That’s not in doubt, but the question is: who was at fault?
The movie has been critically drubbed for being boring and fundamentally misunderstanding the characters, as well as the nature of the property. According to Trank and Kinberg, the film, which is based on the
Ultimate Universe version of the characters, wanted to ground the
Fantastic Four in scientific realism. And the tone is all over the place and contradictory. The movie pushes body horror and the psychological effects of it onto a property which was a superhero family akin to
Star Trek-ian scientific explorers seeking the limits of human knowledge. Because of that, the movie goes on and on with pseudo-scientific exposition that makes no bloody sense whatsoever, while blowing up people's heads like it was a remake of
Scanners, and still trying to do all of that within a superhero origin story capable of being marketable. To put it succinctly, this doesn't work.
The event which makes the characters into the Fantastic Four doesn't happen until almost an hour into a 100 minute movie. There are only two big action sequences in the film, neither of which are all that interesting. Characters like The Thing (Jamie Bell) and Doctor Doom (Toby Kebbell) are re-imagined in the worst ways possible. The Thing has always been the heart of the team, but here he's made into a special forces killer whose signature catchphrase ("It's clobberin time") is a vestige of child abuse. And while racist fanboys have complained about an African-American Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), the true problem was a studio process that desperately wants to hold onto the rights for something which they dislike the elements that makeup the characters.
From Matt Goldberg at Collider:
They had agreed upon this vision for a film. And days before production began, Fox came in and made him pull 3 main action sequences out of the film. I was also told, the ending of the film was not even Josh Trank’s. At some point they hijacked the editing bay from him. To the point that the editing of the film was done without him.
This is not the first movie to bomb spectacularly, have behind-the-scenes bickering, or to damage careers. Below is a list of films and TV shows which were either critical or financial disappointments.
Elizabeth Taylor as 'Cleopatra'
- 1963's Cleopatra, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox. The production was lavish, with massive sets and thousands of extras. It also saw the original director replaced, delays caused the sets to deteriorate and have to be rebuilt, and the script was in constant state of flux. Mankiewicz's original cut of the movie was six hours long. Expenses ultimately ballooned to $44 million, which in 2015 dollars is almost $300 million. Fox was able to recoup much of the cost when audiences turned out for the film, after fascination with the on-set affair between Taylor and Burton (who were married to other people at the time) caught the public's attention.
- With a lot of these projects, one of the usual questions is whether the people involved know they're making a horrible product. If you're saying shitty lines, reacting to silly effects, and there are constant delays and bickering, wouldn't you know things are bad? But a lot of the time, the answer is no, since a sort of groupthink sets in. Julie Salamon's book, The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, describes that very situation on the set of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Based on Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name and directed by Brian de Palma, the film adaptation takes huge liberties with the source material which is centered around a satire of the racial and class politics in New York City during the 1980s, where almost everyone is using the situation to advance their own ambition. The movie softens the characterizations, changes the very nature of others, pulls punches and inserts a character to righteously tell off everyone in order to give the audience a smidgen of hope. The result is a mess that believes it's profound social commentary. According to Salamon's book, casting the film was plagued by disputes over pay and credit, with F. Murray Abraham ultimately refusing to even have his name on the picture. Also, Salamon paints Bruce Willis, who's totally miscast as Peter Fallow, as an egotistical prick that "was generally disliked by most of the cast and crew."
- Disney's John Carter is one of the biggest flops in film history, losing around a quarter of a billion dollars. Just to break even, Disney would have needed John Carter to make more than $600 million globally. It only grossed $284 million. According to various reports, the reason Disney sank so much money into this movie was to appease Andrew Stanton, one of the creative forces at Pixar. John Carter was Stanton's first live-action film and a "passion project" for him. The film had no big name stars, and was a mash-up of three genres (i.e., Civil War, Old West and Science-Fiction) just like the Edgar Rice Burroughs' story it's based on. But that made it a difficult task to market. The failure of this and Battleship during the same summer is thought to have seriously damaged actor Taylor Kitsch's career prospects, which at that point were being positioned to potentially make him a major action star.
- No one expected it to be the most commercial thing in the world, but I don't think either Lou Reed or Metallica expected the intensity of negative reviews and fan backlash which accompanied the album Lulu. Based on the rather bleak plays of German playwright Frank Wedekind, the album is nearly 90 minutes of spoken word lyrics by Reed over instrumentals composed by Metallica. It was almost universally mocked, with some critics calling it "unlistenable." For his part, Reed responded to the criticism by stating the album "is for people who are literate. This isn’t ‘I cry in my beer cause you f—ed him and ran your truck through my bar.”
- Paramount spent over $300 million making and marketing M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender. Based on a well-regarded and epic-in-scope Nickelodeon animated series, the film was castigated by critics and fans, became controversial for "whitewashing" the characters, and added to the continued troubles in Shyamalan's career.
Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in 'Ishtar'
- Ishtar, made in 1987 and directed by Elaine May, was envisioned as a sort of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope road movie, with Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as songwriters who dream of breaking it big and get caught up in a CIA operation in the Middle East. The film was shot on location in Morocco, and suffered production delays, ballooning costs, and infighting between the cast and crew, leading to the budget for the movie doubling. When the press ran with the stories coming out of the production, the movie became a joke even before it was released, and its failure was seen as a foregone conclusion.
- The George Lucas produced Howard the Duck is an infamous bomb. It's a really expensive film where the people behind it had no idea which audience they were appealing to, so the movie has a really schizophrenic tone. On the one hand it tries to be a big-budget science fiction film that appeals to families, and uses Lucas's name to market to the Star Wars audience. But it's also centered around a duck having sex with Lea Thompson, features "duck tits" and a giant alien penis/tongue going into a cigarette lighter. And to show you how far the MPAA ratings have moved in the last 30 or so years, this was a movie that was rated PG in 1986. Howard the Duck is also indirectly responsible for the creation of Pixar. The company was originally a computer graphics division of Lucasfilm/ILM. However, because George Lucas was experiencing money problems from his divorce and the failure of Howard the Duck, Lucas sold off that division to Steve Jobs for $5 million and it became Pixar. In 2006, Pixar was sold to Disney for $7.4 billion.
- In 2010, the brainiacs at NBC decided to give Jay Leno five hours of prime-time real estate with The Jay Leno Show. As part of their plan to produce a network schedule on the cheap, Leno turned The Tonight Show over to Conan O'Brien and hosted a nightly interview-variety show at 10 PM EST. The idea was centered around the fact that a talk show is much cheaper to produce than new episodes of a drama or sitcom, and if Leno could produce decent ratings everyone would profit. However, the result was viewership so low local affiliates complained about the effect on the local news rating because of Leno's poor lead-in. And since NBC schedule had been cleared to make room for Leno's nightly show, the network's schedule became a mess when it blew up in their faces. The resulting aftermath led to Leno returning to The Tonight Show and forcing O'Brien out, which created lots of controversy and further tarnished Leno's legacy.
- Maybe it's because my first exposure to the story was the film, but whenever someone mentions Dune, the aesthetics of David Lynch's film is what comes to mind. The movie was a financial failure and the execution of the story leaves a lot to be desired. The scale of Herbert's book is immense, and would be difficult for any writer or director to condense. Imagine if you had to mold the source material for Game of Thrones down into a two-hour movie. But it's interesting that the powers that be chose Lynch, a director known for films with unorthodox narrative, to shepherd a film that needed to desperately find a way to streamline it. Any Dune film, just as exposition, has to set up the "houses" (i.e., Atreides, Harkonnen, Corrino, etc.). The relationship of the houses to one another and the role of the Emperor of the Known Universe. What the "Spice" is, where it's located, and what it does. The use of the Spice by the Spacing Guild and Bene Gesserit, their motivations, and their relationships and connections to the Houses and the Emperor. And that's all before ya even get into the main story with Paul. The 1984 film attempted to do this with a three minute prologue in which Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) breaks the fourth wall, and I believe some theaters passed out guides which provided backstory. However, audiences were still lost. The intro to the special edition cut of the movie is seven minutes long, and has the feel of a history course just to bring the audience up to speed.
- Billed by Fox as a "social experiment," last year's Utopia ended up being a huge financial loser for the network. 14 strangers were deposited on 5 acres of California land with nothing and told to develop their own society. Hidden cameras were placed all around the property to watch their every movement, with Fox having charged $4.99 per month for 24/7 access. However, despite claims of experimentation, the reality series wasn't that deep and viewers could have cared less about the new Utopian society. Fox ended up losing more than $50 million on the project.
- Adjusting for inflation, the Geena Davis film Cutthroat Island lost $137 million in 1995 and put Carolco Pictures out of business. The movie was the result of the then husband and wife team of Davis and director Renny Harlin trying to advance Davis as an action star. The production was troubled by delays, rewrites and construction and destruction of the film's sets as indecision and delays plagued the film.
- It only aired for four months, but NBC's Supertrain is notable for being such a money loser, that combined with the 1980 Olympics boycott, it almost bankrupted the network. Conceived by then-NBC president Fred Silverman as sort of a light science-fiction version of ABC's The Love Boat, the show was the most expensive television creation ever attempted at the time, and was centered around a nuclear powered intercontinental bullet train, with the stories being about loves and troubles of the passenger's lives. NBC threw money at the show hand over fist, with the set costing at least $5 million to construct. But big ratings never appeared for watching the problems of D-list celebrities traveling on a train track. The network attempted to retool the series, even becoming so desperate they added a laugh track, but it was all for naught.
- Heaven's Gate, made in 1980, is an infamous debacle which contributed to the collapse of United Artists and ruined director Michael Cimino's career. Cimino was coming off the success of The Deer Hunter, and had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1979, decided on a western epic based on the Johnson County War. What was originally a film budgeted for $12 million eventually ended up costing $42 million (which, if adjusted for inflation, would be well over $100 million in 2015 dollars) because of blown schedules and production delays. Studio executives forced Cimino to trim the film from its initial run time of over five hours to around three hours, forty-five minutes. The theatrical cut ran about two-and-a-half-hours. If you cut almost 50 percent of the narrative out of anything, it's going to be a poorly paced, disjointed mess. As an example of his fanatical attention to detail, Cimino tore down an entire street set because it "didn't look right." Cimino wanted the street to be six feet wider. When the set construction boss pointed out that it would be cheaper and faster to tear down one side and move it back six feet, Cimino insisted that both sides be dismantled and moved back three feet, then reassembled. Heaven's Gate is also the reason why the American Humane Association (AHA) monitors animal activities on all movie sets. In Cimino's pursuit of authenticity, four horses were reportedly killed and others seriously injured while shooting the battle scene, as well as allegations that other animals were slaughtered for various scenes. The AHA picketed the film and asked the public to boycott it. The uproar led to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) authorizing the AHA to monitor the use of animals in film production. All in all, Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing approximately $200,000 per day. Heaven's Gate earned less than $3 million domestically when it was released.
- Imagine the worst elements of Law & Order and Glee, then merge them together, and the result would be very close to Cop Rock. When the Steven Bochco produced series premiered in 1990, audiences recoiled from it and found the entire concept of a cop show where characters would break into song to express their feelings about a child murder bizarre. However, after series like Viva Blackpool and more musical episodes of dramas where characters displayed their singing abilities than I can count, if the show premiered today it might not have been written off as easily. Bochco was near the height of his powers as a TV producer, after the success of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, which explains how he convinced ABC to put Cop Rock on the air. But the series biggest problem, beyond the incongruity of the show's nature, was the songs weren't entertaining and the cop stories were bland and generic. The fat lady sang her song, and the series was cancelled after 11 episodes.
- Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is an interesting example of excess. The series premiered in 2006 to a lot of hype, since it was Sorkin returning to television after the critical and popular success of The West Wing, but would only last for one season. The pilot for Studio 60 was reportedly the most expensive drama pilot ever produced for a network at that time. Similar to 30 Rock (which premiered the same year), the show revolved around the behind-the-scenes relationships of a Saturday Night Live-like sketch show, and was largely based on Sorkin's life. However, as much as much as the characters were drawn from real-life experiences, almost all of them come off as stereotypes. Harriet (Sarah Paulson) is almost entirely defined as love interest and resident Christian. Simon (D.L. Hughley) is the "black guy" on the sketch show with every story involving him being about how he doesn't want to be the black guy on Studio 60, which ironically makes every story involving him about that very thing. And then there was the fact it was about a comedy show that was supposed to be the most hilarious thing ever, but every time we were shown the sketches for Studio 60, they were absolutely horrible, which raised the question of why did they even show the "show within the show" at all?
- The film adaptation of Battlefield Earth was the pet project of John Travolta, who as a member of the Church of Scientology wanted to get L. Ron Hubbard's book to the screen. The result was a movie which made little to no sense, had awful visual effects and production design, and involved $31 million in fraud by the film's production company.
- Lastly, 1979's Caligula is primarily infamous for trying to straddle the line between being high art and a porn film, and failing miserably at both. The original script was written by Gore Vidal (who later disowned the film) and it was directed by Tinto Brass. However, the film was produced by Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, who had final cut. Unhappy with Brass's product, he brought in someone else to recut the film and added in hardcore sex scenes, with some of them not making any sense to what little plot the movie had. This led to many different versions of the film. There are reportedly nine different cuts of Caligula, and with each of them you're still left pondering how a movie with good actors (Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud), and gratuitous amounts of sex and violence, can be so damn boring.