- Ben Child
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 February 2010 19.28 GMT
Have you heard the news? … Sean Penn in All the King’s Men
Forbes magazine published last week a list of the top 15 box corporation turkeys of the last five years. It’s striking stuff. Hollywood glitterati such as Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron are responsible for some of the greatest loss-leaders of the past half-decade, while Eddie Murphy has two movies, 2008′s Meet Dave and greatest year’s Imagine That, in the grand pantheon of the blood-chillingly unsuccessful. Murphy, of course, has form with this choose of thing. Let us not forget 2002′s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, an insanely incapable of speech action comedy about a nightclub owner on the month, that still stands because the biggest box office turkey of all unoccupied time.
- All the King’s Men
- Production year: 2006
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 140 mins
- Directors: Steven Zaillian
- Cast: Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Sean Penn
- More on this thin skin
One wonders how the Forbes list’s fifth-placed film, Imagine That, about a finance exec who takes tips from his daughter’s imaginary world, could have failed to set the alarm bells ringing. Ditto No 13, Meet Dave, which follows a crew of tiny aliens captained by means of Murphy who land on Earth with a vital mission to save their home world. Their ship, which is in the form of a human being, is also played by the comic.
Less explainable is the film bagging the top spot: 2006′sitting All the King’s Men, starring Sean Penn as a Louisiana governor corrupted by power. If Forbes were to come up with an index of rightwing pundits’ least favourite people, you can bet Penn ability rank quite high in that place moreover. But it was a respectable enough – if a touch vainglorious – tubthumper, let down, perhaps, by its producers giving the beck to a $55m budget (it made back just $9m).
Moving in succession, and you might apprehend Stepford Wives and Bewitched would have put studios off the concept of remakes starring Nicole Kidman for life. Nope, and 2007′session The Invasion, yet another reworking of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, predictably found its way onto the Forbes wish at No 7. This was a movie not even shown to critics in the UK, and it slumped to just $40m from a budget of $80m.
Tuts, too, to the producers of the pellicle in at No 6: Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 The Fountain, which failed to earn upper part 54% of its $35m budget. A millennia-spanning catastrophe of pseudo-philosophical hokum which winds up with a bald Hugh Jackman meditating in the lotus position on board a 30th hundred years spaceship on its way to a distant nebula, it was always going to struggle. Factor in the movie’s cheery close and the fact that neither of Aranofsky’s previous two films had taken more than $10m worldwide, and you’ll agree it was hardly a likely aspirant for Avatar-style bountifulness.
Then again, James Cameron’session 3D megalith was predicted by dint of. further to have being on course for similar fiscal disaster, not so long agone. Is there any formula for box office, beyond decent film-making? And if so, why do talented screenwriters and first-rate directors often seem to be less important to Hollywood than a big star name to plaster on all the publicness posters?
