The 50 Worst Decisions in Movie History

When Hugh Grant went on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno on July 10, 1995, to promote Nine Months, the host opened the interview with one of the most famous questions in talk-show history: “What the hell were you thinking?” It was a question on the mind of nearly everyone in America since Grant was arrested just a couple of weeks earlier for “lewd conduct” with a sex worker named Divine Brown who he picked up on Sunset Boulevard. He was dating model-actress Elizabeth Hurley at the time and was one of the hottest young actors in the world thanks to his breakthrough role in Four Weddings and a Funeral the previous year. His life couldn’t possibly have been going better. Why would he do something so monumentally stupid and embarrassing? “I keep reading new psychological theories,” he told Leno between agonized smirks. “But you know in life what’s a good thing to do, and what’s a bad thing. I did a bad thing. There you have it.” The public eventually moved on from the scandal and Grant is doing quite fine today, but it hovered over his career, and remains one of the main things people know about him to this day. 

By the end of the Nineties, Will Smith was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. His name on a poster alone could nearly guarantee that a movie would be a hit. But after reaching the stratosphere with Bad Boys and Independence Day, he made a series of really bad decisions. The first one came when the Wachowskis, fresh off their breakthrough movie Bound, met with him to see if he’d take the lead role in their new movie, The Matrix. “They’d only done one movie,” Smith explained in 2019. “They made a pitch for The Matrix. As it turns out, they are geniuses.… [But] I made Wild, Wild West. I’m not proud of it.” Years later, Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker with a ton more experience than the Wachowskis had in 1998, came to him with the script for Django Unchained. He wanted him to play Django. Smith turned him down. “Quentin and I couldn’t see [eye to eye],” Smith said. “I wanted to make that movie so badly, but I felt the only way was, it had to be a love story, not a vengeance story.” Right around this time, he made Men in Black III and After Earth instead.

In hindsight, turning the story of Pearl Harbor into a Michael Bay-directed love story starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale seems like a truly crazy decision. But this was 2001. James Cameron had just obliterated all box office records by turning the Titanic disaster into a Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet romance. Bay himself just scored a huge hit taking the story of an asteroid nearly wiping out all life on Earth into a Ben Affleck-Liv Tyler love story, complete with an Aerosmith ballad that hit Number One. Why not smash the two movies together, sprinkle a smattering of actual history from World War II, and watch money start raining down from the sky? First off, Hartnett is no DiCaprio, no matter how many times Hollywood tried to convince us otherwise at the turn of the millennium. Secondly, Bay was in way over his head with this one. The Titanic sank because it hit an iceberg. It’s simple. Explaining the backstory of Pearl Harbor requires quite a bit more exposition. And casting Jon Voight as FDR didn’t help matters. “Nearly every line of the script drops from the actors’ mouths with the leaden clank of exposition, timed with bad sitcom beats,” The New York Times wrote. “According to the time-tested Bruckheimer formula, each heartfelt utterance must be soothed by a little joke; a moment of light-heartedness must resolve into a muffled choke of pathos. No shot seems to last more than five seconds, no scene more than a minute.” The final product made Armageddon seem like a masterpiece by comparison. 

Jim Varney’s childlike Ernest P. Worrell character visited many places throughout his decade-long run of movies. He went to summer camp in the initial movie, and then moved on to the magical world of Santa Claus, jail, a troll-infested town, high school, a basketball league, and even the Army. (The quality of these movies varies wildly. If you just see one, we recommend Ernest Goes to Jail.) But in 1997, around the time the series descended into low-budget/straight-to-video schlock, they made the unfortunate decision to send Ernest to Africa. We’ll spare you the plot details of this one, but it involves Ernest getting entangled with the fictional Sinkatutu tribe. At one point, he even wears Brownface while posing as a servant. This is a vision of Africa straight out of 1940s Bugs Bunny cartoons. It’s shockingly racist and not the least bit funny. Ernest, we expected better from you.

Up until Christopher Nolan got his hands on the material, Batman Returns was the best movie of the long-running franchise. The world had accepted Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader after some initial doubts the first time around, and Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer were perfect as The Penguin and Catwoman. The movie ends with The Penguin dead, but Catwoman still alive after losing eight of her nine lives. It was the perfect setup for a spinoff movie about Catwoman. But studios didn’t think in terms of “cinematic universes” back then. When they finally got around to making a Catoman movie a dozen years later, they dumped Pfeiffer and started over with Halle Berry. She had won Best Actress two years earlier and was at the peak of her fame, but the movie bombed and shot her down a few Hollywood rungs. When she won Worst Actress at the Razzie Awards, she had the good humor to show up and accept the award in person. “First of all, I want to thank Warner Brothers,” she said, “for putting me in a piece-of-shit, godawful movie. It was just what my career needed! I was at the top, and then Catwoman just plummeted me to the bottom. Love it! It’s hard being on top. It’s much better being on the bottom.” All of this could have been avoided had they stuck with a Catwoman everyone loved and not waited 12 friggin’ years to give her a movie. 

From its earliest days as a Hollywood studio, Disney was associated with quality animated shorts and films. Company founder Walt Disney began his career as a commercial illustrator, and he oversaw the creations of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella, and other cartoon classics. But after Walt died in 1966 and his brother Roy followed five years later, Disney decided that animated movies were relics of the past. They’d still make the occasional one, like The Rescuers or The Fox and the Hound, but their focus became live action dreck like Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Unidentified Flying Oddball, and Gus. If you haven’t heard about that last one, it’s a Don Knotts movie about a mule who plays football. Disney was completely adrift. It wasn’t until The Little Mermaid in 1989 that Disney finally started pouring resources back into animation. It was the start of the Disney renaissance that gave us Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King over the next five years. They could have been making movies like this throughout the Seventies and Eighties. It turns out kids would rather watch fantastical cartoons like The Lion King than a live-action movie about a football-playing mule. Who could have guessed that?

Kevin Costner may be the highest-paid actor in television today thanks to Yellowstone, and he may have a long history of mega-movies like The Bodyguard, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but he’s also responsible for some of the biggest box-office fiascos of the Nineties. It started in 1995 when the budget for his post-apocalyptic epic Waterworld swelled to absurd heights until it was the most expensive movie in history. The film eventually eked out a tiny profit thanks to overseas markets, but it was still an enormous embarrassment for Costner. The smart move would have been to never make another movie like it ever again. Costner decided to double-down on post-apocalyptic snoozefests just two years later, when he directed The Postman and took on the lead role. This time around, he didn’t play a half-man/half-fish hybrid. He was just a normal guy traveling through the ruins of America posing as a mailman. Unlike Waterworld, this one didn’t come close to a profit. It grossed a mere $20 million on a $80 million budget. It was the start of a long wilderness period for Costner where virtually nothing he made seemed to connect. 

The Godfather III had many strikes against it before filming even started. It had been a long 16 years since the last Godfather movie, one of the two sequels in Hollywood history to win Best Picture at the Oscars. (The other is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) During the interim, Coppola’s career flatlined thanks to disasters like One From the Heart, The Cotton Club, and Gardens of Stone. He was making a third Godfather in an attempt to jumpstart things, but Robert Duvall refused to sign on, forcing them to rework the story and proceed without one of the main characters from the first two movies. They did have Winona Ryder committed to the vital role of Mary Corleone, but she dropped out shortly before filming began due to exhaustion. Coppola could have tapped any number of talented young actresses for the role. Not many in Hollywood would have turned down the part. But he decided to give the role to his 18-year-old daughter Sofia. To be clear, Sofia Coppola is an absurdly talented writer-director who has created brilliant movies like Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides, and The Bling Ring. But she was in way over her head in The Godfather III. She just didn’t have the acting chops to take the audience along on Mary’s journey, and the film suffered greatly as a result. It was deeply unfair of her father to put her in that position. 

Mike Judge is one of the greatest satirists of the modern era. If you have any doubt, check out Office Space, Silicon Valley, King of the Hill, and a little MTV cartoon called Beavis and Butt-Head that is still hammering out new episodes 30 years after it premiered. His most prophetic work came in 2006 when he wrote and directed Idiocracy. It focuses on an average man, played by Luke Wilson, that is frozen by the Army as part of an experiment. He wakes up 500 years later in a world where everyone is so painfully dumb that he’s the smartest man on the planet. The president is a professional wrestler named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. The biggest show on television is Oh, My Balls! where people get pummeled in the crotch. Crops are dying because they’re being watered by a sports drink. The whole nation is on the verge of starvation because farms have been reduced to dust bowls. It’s hilarious on many levels, but few people had a chance to see it back in 2006 because Fox dumped it into a handful of small-market theaters and barely spent a dime on promotion. Most people had no clue it even came out. Much like Office Space, it became a cult favorite on DVD in the years that followed. And once Trump kickstarted his campaign, everyone noticed he was basically Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho using another name. Judge was only about 495 years off when predicting the future. 

Revenge of the Nerds is one of the funniest movies of the Eighties. It also has an uplifting message about fighting oppression, embracing our differences, valuing brains over brawn, and rooting for the underdogs. But there’s a very unfortunate scene near the end where Lewis Skolnick, played by Robert Carradine, steals the Halloween costume of his jock rival, brings the jock’s girlfriend into a secluded area, and has sex with her. It’s played for laughs, and the character doesn’t mind when she realizes she’s been tricked. They even wind up marrying each other in the later movies. But it doesn’t matter: This was a rape however you look at it. “It wasn’t until recently that people started to point that scene out and put it in a negative light,” Carradine said in 2019. “It was never our intention to have anything but a funny scene where I get the girl.” Screenwriter Steve Zacharias, however, says he regrets the scene. It’s been removed from a recent musical adaptation of the movie.

During the original run of Star Trek and the early days of its film franchise, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had what Hollywood calls a “favored nations clause.” It means that whatever benefit one received, the other would get as well. And so when Nimoy was given the chance to direct Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Shatner insisted that he be allowed to direct the next one. The only problem was that Nimoy was a very gifted director. He proved that again in 1987 when he shot Three Men and a Baby. William Shatner, sadly, had no such talent. Star Trek: The Final Frontier is a mess from beginning to end. The plot, which centers around the Enterprise crew searching for God at the center of the universe, made little sense. The special effects are ugly and cheap. It’s the clear lowpoint of the entire series. Shanter was brilliant as Capt. Kirk. He belonged in the captain’s chair, not the director’s chair.

Knowing what they know now, Hollywood execs would never allow the entire Lord of the Rings saga to be told in a mere three movies. Those three books are so long and dense that they could have easily supported two movies each, if not three. Big moments had to be cut or trimmed down to the bone to make them work as single movies. They could have also made a ton more money. The people behind Harry Potter learned this lesson when they cut the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two halves. Both were enormous hits. And when The Hobbit was finally adapted into a movie by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, they decided to turn it into three movies. The only problem is that The Hobbit is a kids’ book. The story centers around Bilbo Baggins seeking gold from a dragon. There’s just enough story for a single movie. Turning it into two would have been a major stretch. Turning the book into three movies was batshit crazy and just reeked of greed. It meant all the movies were padded to death, and deeply unsatisfying.

John Belushi and Steven Spielberg were two of the hottest names in Hollywood in 1979. Spielberg was coming off the crazy back-to-back success of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while Belushi was riding high thanks to Animal House and his ongoing run on Saturday Night Live. Putting them together for a movie seemed like a recipe for success. The only problem was the movie, 1941,  was a comedy about Los Angelinos fearing an attack was coming on the mainland in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Nothing about it worked on any level. “This movie was never thought through on a basic level of character and story,” Roger Ebert wrote in a scathing review. “All sorts of things are happening, but we’re never clear why they have to happen, and we haven’t been told enough about the characters to care if they survive or not.” Speilberg bounced right back with Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T., leaving 1941 as little more than a half-forgotten blip. 1941 screenwriters Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale turned their attention to a movie about a 1980s teenager that travels back in time to 1955 and meets his own parents. They were just fine. Belushi’s story is more tragic. After regaining his momentum with Blues Brothers in 1980, his drug-fueled lifestyle caught up with him, and he died in 1982. 

Movie 43 is the brainchild of Farrelly brothers producer Charles B. Wessler. The 2013 film is built entirely around 14 short vignettes, each one shot by a different director, and featuring different actors. The thin pilot that connects them is a psychotic screenwriter, played by Dennis Quaid, that pitches a film executive a series of gross-out movie ideas, like a man with testicles on his chin or a woman that is sexually excited by human feces. It took Wessler 10 years to pull this off, but he somehow roped in huge names like Elizabeth Banks, Richard Gere, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Bob Odenkirk, and Chris Pratt into it. But it turns out there’s a good reason why movies usually have just one director and not 14. They also forgot to make a single segment even remotely funny. It received uniformly awful reviews and vanished from multiplexes within weeks.

As a manager, Colonel Tom Parker was always interested in short-term cash over long-term career positioning. That’s why he felt it made sense to steer Elvis Presley away from pop music and toward quickie B movies in the Sixties. Studios were willing to write fat paychecks to slap Presley’s face on a movie poster. The films could be shot in a matter of weeks. He also figured that movie stars could work steadily for decades and decades, while most pop stars faded from the charts within a couple years of their first hit. He didn’t know that everything was about to change once the Beatles hit. He didn’t know how awful it would look for Elvis that Kissin’ Cousins was playing in theaters just as Beatlemania was sweeping across America. It’s a profoundly stupid movie where Elvis plays an Air Force officer and his hillbilly cousin. This was just seven years after Jailhouse Rock, but he already felt like a relic from an earlier time. 

The MPAA has been assigning letter grades to movies for so long that most people don’t even question it anymore. But if you take a few steps back and really consider it, the system makes little sense. Why do torture-porn movies like Saw and Hostel receive mere R ratings, while sexually explicit films like Orgazmo, Showgirls, and Blue Is the Warmest Color get saddled with NC-17s? What they’re essentially saying is that it’s less harmful for minors to see a person hacked into pieces in the most sadistic ways imaginable than for them to see that same person having sex. And we’re not talking about truly pornographic content here. If the MPAA finds the nudity in a movie excessive, they give it an NC-17 and guarantee most theaters won’t touch it. There’s also the absurd rule where PG-13 movies can only feature a single usage of the world “fuck.” They really think the precious ears of adolescents can handle a single “fuck,” but will be irreparably poisoned by a second one? This is all just outdated nonsense and needs to seriously be reconsidered. 

For a glorious moment in the Seventies, visionary directors like Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Frances Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg seized control of Hollywood from the major studios. They were allowed to make big-budget movies like The Godfather, Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange, and Taxi Driver without suits breathing down their necks and denying them final cut. This gave us some of the greatest movies ever created. But it all came crashing down in 1980, when Michael Cimino followed up The Deer Hunter with Heaven’s Gate, a western starring Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, and Kris Kristofferson. The shoot was an endless series of disasters where the budget swelled to four times its initial estimate, and the cast was nearly driven to madness due to endless retakes. When the original cut bombed during its first run, the studio took it back and trotted out a shortened version several months later. By that point, nobody cared. Many critics today regard Heaven’s Gate as a misunderstood classic, but that didn’t stop it from doing significant damage. The debacle was one of the primary reasons studios took control back from directors in the Eighties, ending the glorious auteur era.

The first two Deadpool movies could hardly have been more successful. The 2016 Ryan Reynolds movie and the 2018 sequel grossed more than $1.5 billion combined. And fans and critics loved nearly everything about them, including the pivotal decision to dramatically up the gore and swear-word count from your typical Marvel film, even if that meant accepting an R rating. A third one is coming soon, featuring the return of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. It’s almost guaranteed to be a smash. But the series nearly died before it even launched. They first rolled out Reynolds as Deadpool in the 2009 flop X-Men Origins: Wolverine. You may not remember that since it’s an off-brand version of the character where he’s not wearing the red suit and mask. And in a move that still baffles no matter how many times they’ve tried to explain it, his mouth is sewn shut, making it impossible for the character to spout his trademark quips. Most of the time, it’s a stunt double as opposed to Reynolds himself. There isn’t a single thing about this version of Deadpool that works on any level. It’s so dumb that the first two Deadpool movies subtly mock it several times, culminating in a mid-credit sequence in the second movie where he travels back in time to the time of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to snuff the character out of existence. 

When George Lucas headed off to the deserts of Tunisia in 1976 to film the original Star Wars, Hollywood paid little attention. He’d proven his value as a director with 1973’s American Graffiti, which was enough for 20th Century Fox to sign off on his space project, but even they had no clue that he was about to change the film industry forever. They just hoped to receive a return on their investment. And when he offered to exchange his $500,000 salary in exchange for the merchandise and sequel rights, they gladly agreed. They simply couldn’t imagine a future for Star Wars lunch boxes, action figures, toy lightsabers. They certainly didn’t think that new Star Wars movies and television shows would still be coming out nearly 50 years later. In 2012, George Lucas sold his Star Wars rights to Disney for $4 billion. By that time, the franchise had grossed somewhere in the ballpark of $20 billion when you factor in merch. All that cash could have gone to Fox had they simply told Lucas to keep his lousy $500,000. 

Richard Pryor is undoubtedly one of the greatest stand-up comedians in history. But with the lone exception of a few projects, like Stir Crazy and Brewster’s Millions, he made really lousy movies. The low point came in 1982, when he starred in The Toy where he plays a desperate man that gets “purchased” by a rich father, played by Jackie Gleason, to serve as a plaything to his spoiled son. The creative team behind this movie, including Superman director Richard Donner, surely had good intentions. But this is essentially a movie about a slave. It’s also painfully unfunny for a supposed comedy. “Donner, with his embarrassingly bad direction, manages to suck dry the talents of everyone involved,” reads a review in the Austin Chronicle. “[It is] one of the worst comedies ever to emerge from a major studio.” Donner made Goonies just three years later. It’s as perfect as The Toy is horrid. It also manages to create jokes that don’t remind viewers of the most horrific chapter in American history.

This may surprise people that lived through it, but 1999 is now regarded by movie buffs as one of the greatest years in Hollywood history. It’s the year that gave us Fight Club, Magnolia, The Matrix, Election, Office Space, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, The Blair Witch Project, Boys Don’t Cry, The Sixth Sense, The Virgin Suicides, Galaxy Quest, Being John Malkovitch, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and too many other classics to list here. (Check out Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen to learn more about it.) When the Academy Awards handed out Best Picture that year, however, they went with American Beauty. This seemed like a very profound work of cinema at the time, but try watching it again. It revolves around Kevin Spacey desperately trying to have sex with his teenage daughter’s best friend. We’re supposed to think there’s deep meaning behind a plastic bag blowing in the wind. There’s a whole gay panic plot with the evil guy next door. It’s hard to get through any random five minutes without cringing. Giving it Best Picture in any given year seems nuts today, but it’s especially insane when you look at the other choices they had. 

Ask a young movie fan to name the worst Marvel movie and you’re likely to hear about Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, or The Eternals. Those with slightly longer memories will likely reference Spider-Man 3, Blade: Trinity or Elektra. But anyone with a deep reservoir of knowledge won’t hesitate. They’ll immediately call out Howard the Duck and end the debate. The 1986 movie, produced by George Lucas, centers around an alien from Duckworld that travels to Cleveland. He befriends a young Lea Thompson, nearly has sex with her in one of the most disturbing moments in cinema history, and battles the Dark Lord of the Universe. It’s supposedly a comedy, but the laughs never really come. There’s also the small problem that Howard the Duck himself is way creepier than the filmmakers intended. He’s an expressionless hellbeast that will haunt your dreams. The movie was a complete bomb that proved Lucas isn’t infallible. It was another 22 years before Iron Man came along and showed the industry how to do this Marvel thing properly. 

On July 18th, 2019, the first trailer for Cats appeared online. Within seconds, people on Twitter had difficulty focusing on anything else. There were many questions. How could the “digital fur” applied to all the actors via CGI look this shitty? Why do the female characters have human-like breasts without nipples? Where are their genitals? Why do their tails look like they’re coming out of the wrong part of their bodies? Why do I feel like I’ve just journeyed into some ghastly corner of hell? It turns out the creative team behind the movie had many of these same questions. The “digital fur” was a nightmare to create, and they didn’t have time to get it right. They worked furiously right up until the premiere date, and even added improvements after the movie hit theaters, which is almost unprecedented in movie history. There are many, many other problems with Cats, which is why it has a 19 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but it was hard for anyone to focus on any of them when it just looked so shitty and disturbing. 

Imagine you’re Michael Oher. You earned millions of dollars playing eight seasons in the NFL. Nearly everyone you meet knows the incredible story of your life, especially the part about being brought in by the wealthy Tuohy family as a teenager, and sent to a fancy private school that helped you secure a spot at the University of Mississippi. That might sound pretty great. Now imagine that they made a movie about your life that portrays you as a Forrest Gump-like simpleton with borderline magical powers that didn’t know how to even play the game of football until you were taught by Sandra Bullock and a little kid moving around ketchup bottles on a table. Imagine that movie grossed $300 million and played on TV all of the time. Imagine if everyone believes that it tells the 100 percent true story of your life. That would drive you pretty nuts, right? “People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie,” Oher said in 2015. “They don’t really see the skills and the kind of player I am. That’s why I get downgraded so much, because of something off the field.” Oher eventually filed a lawsuit against the Tuohys, claiming they unfairly denied him profits from the movie and lied about adopting him. (They strenuously object to his charges.) Regardless of who is right and wrong, there’s no doubt The Blind Side has caused Oher a lot of pain. Would it have been so hard to portray his life accurately?

Mel Gibson’s biblical epic The Passion of the Christ was one of the biggest movies of 2004, grossing $612 million worldwide. The film focuses on the final days of Jesus’ life, culminating with a brutal crucifixion scene. Before it even came out, Jewish organizations were concerned it would spread the myth that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death. “The Passion of the Christ continues its unambiguous portrayal of Jews as being responsible for the death of Jesus,” the ADL wrote in a statement. “There is no question in this film about who is responsible. At every single opportunity, Mr. Gibson’s film reinforces the notion that the Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob are the ones ultimately responsible for the Crucifixion.… We do not know what is in [Mel Gibson’s] heart. We only know what he has put on the movie screen.” Two years later, the world learned exactly how Gibson felt about Jews when he was arrested for drunk driving. “Fucking Jews,” he said to the arresting officer. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” If there was any doubt Gibson harbored antisemitism in his heart, it vanished in that moment. 

The original Alien launched Ridley Scott as a titanic force in Hollywood, paving the way for Blade Runner and everything that followed in his career. James Cameron was given the reins of the franchise for Aliens, demonstrating he could handle a big-budget movie after proving himself with The Terminator. For Alien III in 1992, the studio handed control to director David Fincher. He spent the Eighties shooting music videos for Madonna, Sting, Pala Abdul, and many other superstars, and they felt he was finally ready to make a movie. But the project had major script problems from the beginning and went through many incarnations during preproduction. The studio began to fear their untested director couldn’t handle the project. They hated his initial cut, insisted on reshoots, and then created a new edit without his consent. The movie was still a major disappointment. Fincher looks back on it as one of the worst times of his career, and said it nearly caused him to quit the business entirely. Thankfully he stuck around and gave the world Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and many other masterpieces. In other words, the man knows how to make a movie. Who knows what could have happened had he been allowed to execute his vision for Alien 3 without studio meddling.

On Dec. 31, 2006, The New York Times ran an article headlined “Mike Myers: Intentional Man of Mystery.” The man himself wasn’t interviewed for the piece, which presented him as a mysterious genius prone to long absences from the public sphere until reemerging with brilliant new franchises like Wayne’s World, Austin Powers, or Shrek. They note that his next movie centered around a “love guru” from India. “In 2005, the character made his debut on some small theater stages in Greenwich Village, just as his Austin Powers persona was once honed at Los Angeles nightspots,” the Times writes. “Unrecognizable in makeup, a white wig and a yogi’s long flowing beard, Mr. Myers — who called himself Pitka — dispensed wild advice to the audience in a thick Indian accent.” In other words, he had a truly terrible idea for a new character that would involve him dressing up as an Indian. He had the sense not to wear brownface, but that’s the only saving grace of 2008’s Love Guru, which roped in co-stars Justin Timberlake and Jessica Alba. It’s a painfully unfunny movie that did tremendous damage to his career. Crazy as it sounds, it was the last time he had the lead role in a movie. His film work over the past 15 years has been entirely in animation, documentaries, and supporting roles. There’s been loose talk of Austin Powers 4 and even hopes of a Wayne’s World 3 (at least in the minds of fans), but nobody is talking about The Love Guru 2. There never should have even been a Love Guru 1.

In a fair world, Orson Welles would have been given the freedom to make whatever movies he wanted for the rest of his life after Citizen Kane. It was his very first movie, he was just 24, and it’s inarguably one of the greatest films of all time, if not the very greatest. But in this universe, the movie was a flop, and it ruffled the feathers of some absurdly powerful people. This was also a time when the studios, not directors, were the major forces in Hollywood. Directors were seen as replaceable cogs in the movie machine. And so when Welles adapted Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel about a wealthy family at the turn of the century, he didn’t have final cut. When the studio didn’t like his version of the movie, they simply pushed him aside, and took a hatchet to his hard work. They chopped out nearly an hour, added in a happy ending, and even lost a ton of footage. There have been re-edits in recent years based on original Welles notes, and even an attempt to animate what was lost, but it’s impossible to re-create what could have been. It’s gone forever. Sadly, this wasn’t the last time Welles would face this sort of issue in his career.

Turning Pearl S. Buck’s 1931 book The Good Earth into a movie was a good idea. It’s about a Chinese family living in a small village in the Anhui province that was a huge bestseller in the early days of the Great Depression. It taught Americans a lot about day-to-day life in rural China, and many historians argue that it helped Americans sympathize with China against Japan at the start of World War II. Where they erred in making the film adaptation — and this is a biggie — was casting white Americans in all of the lead roles. They wore yellowface makeup. It’s just about as cringy as you can imagine. In the years that followed, the studio tried to argue they wanted to use Chinese actors, but felt that Americans “weren’t ready” for such a movie. They also tried to blame the Hays Code for forcing them not to have any characters in mixed-race relationships. Whatever the truth, it’s time for a remake with an actual Chinese cast. 

At the end of the 2017 Academy Awards, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway walked up to the podium to hand out the award for Best Picture. Beatty pulled the supposed winning name out of a red envelope, looked a bit dumbfounded, peeked back in to see if something else was hiding in there, and then started to speak in a very halting fashion. “And the Academy Award … for best Best Picture.…” He stopped himself, unsure of how to proceed since he was staring at a slip of paper that said Emma Stone wins Best Actress for La La Land. A frustrated Dunaway then glanced at the paper and said La La Land into the mic. The next two and a half minutes were absolute chaos, offstage and off, since representatives from PricewaterhouseCoopers, who were tasked with passing out envelopes and making sure the right names were read, totally froze. Stage manager Gary Natoli eventually took matters into his own hands by going onto the stage and telling the La La Land producers that Moonlight actually won. Beatty and Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope. This was the first Academy Awards after Donald Trump won, and it added to the sense that the world was breaking down and nothing was working like it should.

The story of studios compromising the visions of ambitious directors and chopping down their movies is nearly as old as Hollywood. Orson Welles had to deal with this indignity for the vast majority of his career. The sad reality is that studios usually have the final say over the final cut of their movies. The directors work for them. The most egregious example of studio butchery in Hollywood history took place in 1984, when Sergio Leone’s crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, James Woods, and Elizabeth McGovern was cut from four hours and 29 minutes to two hours and 19 minutes. They also rearranged the scenes in a way that made the movie unwatchable. “Relationships are truncated, scenes are squeezed of life, and I defy anyone to understand the plot of the short version,” Roger Ebert wrote. “The original Once Upon a Time in America gets a four-star rating. The shorter version is a travesty.” There have been numerous attempts over the years to restore Once Upon a Time in America to its original form, though most Americans have only seen the truncated one. That’s a tragedy since this movie deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as The Godfather and Goodfellas. If the studio had just trusted Leone and allowed his version of the movie back in 1984, history would have unfolded very differently. 

Whoopi Goldberg comedies, buddy-cop action flicks, and sci-fi films about dinosaurs generated a ton of money back in the Nineties. But if you mash up Sister Act, Bad Boys, and Jurassic Park, you wind up with the ungodly horror that was 1996’s Theodore Rex. If you aren’t familiar with this particular piece of celluloid history, it takes place in a freakish future where police officers and anthropomorphic dinosaurs in tennis shoes work together to solve crime. If you think this sounds like a dumb concept for a movie, you are not wrong. Goldberg realized this herself after verbally agreeing to shoot the film and tried to wiggle out of it, leading to a lawsuit and ultimate salary of $7 million. But she was practically shooting the movie with a gun to her head, and it shows in every frame. The budget eventually swelled to $33 million even though Theodore Rex is just a guy in a cheap rubber suit straight out of the TV show Dinosaurs. The studio eventually learned they’d made a horrible mistake and dumped it straight to VHS. At the time, it was the most expensive straight-to-DVD film in Hollywood history. All these years later, Theodore Rex has become Hollywood shorthand for a “really, really, really dumb idea.”

In the early years of Hollywood, films that depicted unrepentant criminality, philandering spouses, and drug addiction were commonplace. But once talkies arrived and theaters spread all over the nation, calls for government censorship began growing louder and louder. (Remember, this was a somewhat puritanical time when alcohol was illegal nationwide.) Before the government had any chance to pass laws censoring movies, the studios decided to simply do the job themselves by establishing the Hays Code. Simply put, it severely limited what filmmakers could put on the screen. Once they began to strictly enforce the code in 1935, movies changed in significant ways. Anyone that committed an “immoral act” needed to be punished before the end of the picture. There couldn’t be even a hint of sexual activity, even between happily married characters. You couldn’t mock the Christian faith in any way, and you couldn’t show “mixed race” couples or homosexuality. The list goes on and on. Clever filmmakers found subtle ways around it, but it still forced huge creative compromises on nearly every movie. It wasn’t lifted until 1968, when ratings entered the picture, ending the need for such rigid self-censorship.

Some of the best movies in Hollywood history are remakes. That’s even true in the case of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, which was actually the third attempt to adapt L. Frank Baum’s book into a motion picture. But if you’re going to create a movie that’s already been attempted, you want to make sure you’re telling the story in a new and interesting way. And if a perfect version of the movie already exists, you need a really compelling reason to revisit it. Gus Van Sant didn’t follow either of these unwritten rules in 1998, when he decided to film a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, and Viggo Mortensen as a cinematic experiment nobody was asking to see. This was right after Good Will Hunting, when Van Sant could have gotten the go-ahead to make any movie he wanted, which made his decision to remake Psycho all the more baffling. It is simply not possible to improve on the original. And creating a virtual carbon copy does little but inspire unflattering comparisons. “The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema,” Roger Ebert wrote in a brutal one-a-half-star pan, “because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.” In other words, what the hell was anyone thinking when they thought this was a good idea?

It’s easy to forget that Star Wars was aimed at children from the very beginning. The original trilogy had R2-D2, C-3PO, Ewoks, and many other characters designed to delight young people and make for great toys. And when George Lucas returned to the Star Wars universe in the late Nineties to create The Phantom Menace, he felt he had to create another character that children could latch onto. Unfortunately, he went with a dundering, oafish, Gungan named Jar Jar Binks that speaks in broken English and felt uncomfortably like a crude Jamaican stereotype. Here are some sample Jar Jar words of wisdom: “Dissen ganna be bery messy!,” “How wuude!,” and “Whaten dey speaking?” Lucasfilm felt that Jar Jar would be the breakout character of the film and created mountains of Jar Jar merchandise. We even put him on the cover of Rolling Stone. But critics didn’t care much for Jar Jar, kids didn’t care much for Jar Jar, and Star Wars fanatics really, really didn’t care for Jar Jar. They even created an entirely new version of the movie where his dialogue was dubbed over with the words of a wise elder. Lucas got the memo and virtually erased the character from the sequels, but the damage was done. Jar Jar Binks has become a symbol of everything wrong with the prequels. (To be fair, they look pretty good today when compared with the latest batch of sequels.)

Judy Garland was just 16 years old when she signed on to play Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz. But even at that young stage in her life, she was very familiar with the brutal expectations of Hollywood, especially when it came to remaining rail-thin and working 18-hour days. To get through it all, the studio gave her a nearly-toxic assortment of barbiturates and amphetamines designed to wake her up in the morning, fall asleep at night, and keep off any excess weight. It didn’t take long for her to become hopelessly addicted. The brass at MGM couldn’t have possibly cared less. They just wanted their star to keep working. But the pills took a terrible toll on her body. She was just 47 when she died, but looked about 20 years older. The tragedy could have been avoided if only the Hollywood studio system of the Thirties and Forties cared even a little about the health of their stars.

After Steven Spielberg created Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a period of just six years, most studio heads would have been happy to let him do whatever he wanted for this next project. But when he approached Columbia CEO Frank Price with the idea for E.T., Price decided to pass, thinking that a story about a kindly alien that bonds with a small boy would only appeal to children. Columbia sold the script to MCA for a million dollars and five percent of the profits. The movie, of course, was a colossal success, grossing nearly $800 million. A few years later, the studio had similar doubts about Back to the Future and let that one go, too. The dunderheaded streak continued in the early Nineties when Columbia shot down Pulp Fiction. Before either of those things could happen, Price left Columbia for a new role at Universal. One of his first major projects? Howard the Duck.

Judging pop-cultural creations of the past through the prism of the present can sometimes be unfair. Standards change over time, and jokes that once landed without a hint of controversy are now seen as deeply offensive. It doesn’t mean the people making them were terrible. They just came of age in a different era. But we’re only willing to take this line of reasoning so far. Some things are so egregiously offensive that “but it was the past!” simply doesn’t cut it as an excuse. A great example is Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Japanese photographer-landlord I.Y. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Casting Rooney as an Asian character was bad enough, but he wore face makeup, a prosthetic mouth piece, and spoke broken English in a thick, cartoonish accent. It’s impossible to imagine a stereotype more obnoxious and crude. It’s so wildly offensive that it basically ruins an otherwise wonderful film. Also, this wasn’t 1931 — it was 1961. They should have known better. ​​And even the press at the time took note. “Mickey Rooney gives his customary all to the part of a Japanese photographer,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter, “but the role is a caricature and will be offensive to many.” That is quite the understatement. 

As Mel Brooks proved with The Producers in 1967, there’s nothing wrong with making a funny movie about Hitler and the Nazis. Roberto Benigni proved it’s even possible to make a comedy about the Holocaust itself with 1997’s Life Is Beautiful. That movie collected three Academy Awards, including Best Actor. But it requires a very delicate touch and the right tone. Jerry Lewis, the man behind The Disorderly Orderly, The Nutty Professor, and Boeing Boeing, was not the best man for this job. He tried in 1972 with The Day the Clown Cried, where he played a German clown that winds up escorting Jewish children into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The movie never actually came out because screenwriter Joan O’Brien wouldn’t sign off on the final product. The movie instantly gained legendary status as the single worst idea for a movie in Hollywood history. Bits of the movie have surfaced over the decades, but there’s reportedly not even a complete negative anywhere in the world. That’s probably for the best.

By the turn of the millennium, John Travolta was one of the most successful actors in Hollywood. That fact would have stunned anyone back in 1993 when Look Who’s Talking Now hit theaters (that’s the one where the dogs talk), but he followed that up with a little movie called Pulp Fiction. He then made Get Shorty, Michael, Face/Off, A Civil Action, Phenomenon, Primary Colors, and other big movies in quick succession. This gave him enough juice to finally actualize his dream of turning L. Ron Hubbard’s 1982 novel Battlefield Earth into a motion picture. This was a transparent attempt to spread the gospel of Scientology via the nation’s multiplexes, even though Travolta’s team denied it every time the subject came up. “I’ve never even dealt with or talked to the church on this,” Travolta’s manager said. “This is an action-adventure, science-fiction story. Period. The movie has nothing to do with Scientology.” This was, of course, a complete crock of shit. That might have been somewhat excusable if Battlefield Earth was a good movie, a decent movie, or even a middling movie. But it’s a terrible movie. Every second of it is agony. It’s hard to imagine a single person converting to Scientology because of it. They were too busy falling asleep or laughing at the ridiculous sight of Travolta with dreadlocks. It won eight Golden Raspberry Awards and the Worst Picture of the Decade award in 2010. If Earth sticks around long enough for the Golden Raspberry Awards to hand out a “worst movie of the century” at their 2100 ceremony, it’ll probably win that, too.

It’s not hard to understand why the team behind 1981’s Roar felt they had to use real lions on set. The plot of the Noel Marshall/Tippi Hedren/Melanie Griffith movie revolves around an American family that moves to a nature preserve in Tanzania to study lions. This was years before CGI and putting humans in lion costumes was just out of the question. They’d look as phony as the apes in Planet of the Apes. What is impossible to understand is why they felt using actual wild lions, as opposed to trained, domestic ones, made even the tiniest bit of sense, and why the studio and their insurance company signed off on this psychotic scheme. Marshall was bit by a lion so hard at one point that he nearly lost his arm. Griffith was virtually scalped in a vicious attack that required 50 sutures. Nearly every member of the cast and crew was attacked at some point, and accounts from the set read like a real-life horror movie, but they somehow decided to just keep forging ahead. The topper is that the movie was an enormous box-office dud. Few people today have ever heard of Roar. But the unlucky few that worked on that set will never, ever forget it.

In 1947, 33 years before he became president, and when he still considered himself a Democrat, Ronald Reagan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, and they wanted to know if communists had infiltrated the organization. “There has been a small group within the Screen Actors Guild which has consistently opposed the policy of the guild board and officers of the guild, as evidenced by the vote on various issues,” he said. “That small clique referred to has been suspected of more or less following the tactics that we associated with the Communist Party.… I have heard different discussions and some of them tagged as Communists.” That was all the committee needed to hear. It was the start of a horrible chapter in Hollywood history in which the government was hunting down suspected communists, and anyone tagged as one would basically be unable to work for the next decade. It caused enormous damage to the careers of many good people, including Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, Dalton Trumbo, and Lena Horne. 

The original Home Alone grossed nearly $500 million on a budget of just $18 million. It’s become a Christmas standard beloved by generations of children, and it launched a franchise that continues to this day. For 20th Century Fox, this was the dream scenario when they took on the film back in 1990. But every single cent could have gone to Warner Bros., the original studio attached to the movie during production, but Warner Bros. balked when director Christopher Colmbus said he needed $17 million to finish it. They told him they weren’t willing to go higher than $14 million. Unwilling to cut corners, the Home Alone team — including screenwriter John Hughes — figured out a way to wiggle out of the deal and get 20th Century Fox to give them the money they needed. Making matters worse, Warner Bros. had to watch Bonfire of the Vanities go down in flames at this exact same time. “There is little cheer at Warner Brothers today,” read a year-end article in The New York Times. “While many Americans refused to spend money on last-minute Christmas gifts, they were no more willing to fill those idle hours by going to Bonfire of the Vanities. [The movie] cost about $40 million to produce and more to promote, but it took in a paltry $3.1 million in its opening weekend.” Meanwhile, Home Alone was shattering box-office records. Not a great Christmas for the Warner Bros. team.

The tragedy on the set of the 1983 movie Twilight Zone that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors has been the subject of much debate and legal action over the past four decades. Sticking solely to undisputed facts, the accident occurred during the shooting of the “Time Out” segment, where a man travels back in time to the Vietnam War and needs to protect two Vietnamese children. Director John Landis hired seven-year-old Myca Dinh Le and six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen for the roles, even though he didn’t file the legal paperwork required for them to appear on camera. During the filming of an action scene, a helicopter crashed. The blades decapitated Morrow and Le. Chen was crushed to death. The sequence was removed from the movie, and years of lawsuits followed. And even though nobody was found criminally liable for what happened, the lawsuits revealed that basic safety precautions were not taken. “No movie is worth dying for,” Twilight Zone producer Steven Spielberg said years later. “I think people are standing up much more now, than ever before, to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, ‘Cut!'”

As Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have proved many times over the past 15 years, they can take any concept Hollywood throws at them — no matter how seemingly inane — and turn it into a brilliant film. On paper, films based on Lego characters or the Eighties TV show 21 Jump Street are horrible, bottom-of-the-barrel ideas. In their hands, they were both stellar movies. When word came out that Disney was trusting them with a Star Wars movie focusing on the early days of Han Solo, fans rejoiced. But midway through production, they were fired. “I think these guys are hilarious,” said Lucasfilm President Katheleen Kennedy, “but they come from a background of animation and sketch comedy, and when you are making these movies you can do that and there’s plenty of room for improvisation, we do that all the time, but it has to be inside of a highly structured process or you can’t get the work done.” Kennedy hired Ron Howard to take over the project. The end result was not just a deeply disappointing film, but the first Stars Wars movie to underperform at the box office. The fiasco forced Lucasfilm to put its other Star Wars theatrical projects on hold and start focusing on TV shows. We’ll never know what a Miller-Lord Solo would have looked like, but it certainly would have been significantly better than the one we got. When you hire great people, you have to sit back and let them do their thing. Pulling the plug before they can show you a finished product is deeply unfair.

It’s very hard to feel bad for Matt Damon. He’s one of the most successful actors of the past two decades, and he’s swimming in money thanks to the Bourne franchise and other colossally successful movies. But in the 2000s, he had an opportunity to dramatically up his wealth when James Cameron approached him about playing the lead role in Avatar. He was offered 10 percent of the back end as an enticement. The only problem was that it conflicted with his work on a Bourne movie. “I had to get it all the way to the finish line,” he said, “and I would have to leave the movie kind of early and leave them in the lurch a little bit and I didn’t want to do that.” The decision wound up costing him $250 million. Damon has talked about this several times over the years, but Cameron feels he needs to let it go. “He’s beating himself up over this,” Cameron said in 2023. “And I really think, you know, ‘Matt you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world, get over it.’” Would you get over $250 million?

Despite all the success that Will Smith has had throughout his long career, he’s always struggled to get taken seriously as an actor. That’s because he started as a rapper, spent years on a sitcom, and was best known for popcorn flicks like Men in Black and Bad Boys. But in 2022, he was finally on pace to receive a Best Actor Academy Award for his role as Richard Williams in King Richard. It was going to be the crowning moment of his career. But shortly before they gave him the award, which everyone knew was coming, Chris Rock made a joke onstage about his wife, Jada Pinkett, who had shaved her head due to alopecia. Smith then walked onstage and slapped Rock hard in the face as tens of millions of people watched. “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth!” Smith roared. It briefly felt like a rehearsed comedy bit, but it was no such thing. Smith still received his Best Actor award that night, and he attempted to apologize, but it wasn’t enough. The academy banned him from the Oscars for a decade. Apple was forced to delay the release of his new project Emancipation by several months because the slapping incident was such an enormous distraction. The film wound up underperforming anyway. Smith gave Rock amazing material to use on his next standup tour, but he benefited in no way from the incident. It was just a wild, unforced error. 

In 1997, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen published the groundbreaking book The Innovator’s Dilemma. It explained that hugely successful companies often fail in the long run because plucky, disruptive firms with little to lose have an easier time implementing new systems that can revolutionize a business. At the time it was written, Blockbuster was at the peak of its powers. Their video-rental stores dotted suburban landscapes and were as ubiquitous as Starbucks or McDonalds. And when Netflix came around and began mailing DVDs straight to consumers, eliminating late fees and the need to leave your house, Blockbuster didn’t see a threat or any need to change their practices. In 2000, Blockbuster was given the opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million. It was turned down. “Well, shit,” co-founder Marc Randolph recalled saying after the meeting. “Blockbuster doesn’t want us. So it’s obvious what we have to do now-… It looks like now we’re going to have to kick their ass.” Flash forward 23 years and Netflix is valued at nearly $200 billion. Blockbuster doesn’t exist for all intents and purposes except for a single store in Bend, Oregon. There were more than 9,000 at the chain’s peak. Had it made a different move back in 2000, Blockbuster Netflix could be the biggest name in streaming.

If you were making a big movie in the Seventies or early Eighties and needed a leading man, odds were pretty decent you’d offer the role to Burt Reynolds. The man was a titan of Hollywood throughout the era that pounded out hit movies like Deliverance, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The Longest Yard, Smokey and the Bandit, and Cannonball Run. But he also had a remarkable talent for turning down movies. The streak of colossal bad decisions began when he refused a chance to play James Bond after Sean Connery stepped aside because he felt Americans wouldn’t accept an American Bond. It continued when he said no to the Michael Corleone part in The Godfather, Jack Nicholson’s part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and peaked when he rejected an overture to play Han Solo in Star Wars. Years later, he even declined an opportunity to play Richard Gere’s part in Pretty Woman. Al Pacino, Roger Moore, Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson and Richard Gere are forever grateful for these judgment calls, but Reynolds regretted nearly all of them. Hey, at least he agreed to make Cop and a Half, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, and Not Another Not Another Movie. 

The 1956 historical epic The Conquerer was awash in bad decisions before they even started shooting the damn thing. The lead role of Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan was originally written for noted non-Asian actor Marlon Brando, which would have been absolutely ridiculous. When he dropped out, they didn’t move onto an actual Asian thespian that could play the role with credibility. They went for John “I believe in white supremacy” Wayne. Did they slather his face with makeup and use rubber bands to pull back his eyes? They sure did. If that wasn’t insane enough, they decided to shoot the movie at nuclear testing sites around Utah. It’s impossible to prove cause and effect, but 41 percent of the crew developed cancer in the decades that followed, and 21 percent died from it. That 21 percent includes Wayne himself. These people didn’t even die for a good movie. The Conquerer is absolutely horrible. “Wayne portrays the great conqueror as a sort of cross between a square-shootin’ sheriff and a Mongolian idiot,” Time wrote in a scathing review. “The idea is good for a couple of snickers, but after that it never Waynes but it bores.”