This Year's Best Picture-Baiting Failures

Posted by Michael Dance

She's depressed because her movie flopped.

It's always amusing (and a little sad) to look back, even on a month-to-month basis, at what Oscar predictors thought was going to be "on the short list" of the five films nominated for Best Picture. There are always a lot of major contenders, but then once they're actually released, you realize they have no clothes on.

For some reason, the example that always sticks with me is The Majestic. In 2001, Jim Carrey was coming out with a heartwarming 1950s-set drama directed by The Shawshank Redemption's Frank Darabont, and for months everybody said it was a shoo-in for a Best Picture nomination, or at the very least, Jim Carrey was totally going to get another Golden Globe for Best Actor.

It opened to bad reviews and a pitiful $5 million opening weekend and everybody promptly forgot about it. And you know what? That happens to about ten movies every year.

The highest-profile failure was perhaps 2006's All the King's Men. It was a remake of a classic 1949 film. It was political. It was directed by Steve Zaillian, who helped write Gangs of New York and Schindler's List. And oh, the cast: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, and Anthony Hopkins.

It got mostly bad reviews, but it had a few supporters; a lot of people said Penn was terrific (although even more said he was just chewing scenery). But the critical response paled in comparison to the public response: audiences, perhaps not in the mood for anything political, avoided it at all costs. It made less than $3.7 million in its opening weekend and clocked out entirely at $7 million -- against a $55 million production budget and tens of millions more in advertising. Zaillian said in a later interview that the experience was like "getting hit by a truck."

It's worth noting that Hollywood didn't learn its lesson about heavily political films. The following year, all the political dramas, like Rendition and Lions for Lambs, bombed, and even this year, Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe couldn't make Body of Lies a hit.

That brings me to the topic of this post: what were this year's failures? It's not December, and pretty much everything that's coming out has been seen. What fell by the wayside that people once considered contenders for Best Picture in 2008?

Body of Lies: aside from the "political movie" stigma (not to mention the "Middle East movie" stigma), it just wasn't very good -- a mediocre action thriller inhabited by very stupid Americans (both DiCaprio and Crowe's characters should walk around with dunce caps. Honestly). It didn't even hit $40 million at the box office, and its production budget was something like $130 million. Stupid.

Australia: another expensive bad investment. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman aren't proven moneymakers (in fact, Kidman has a pretty bad recent track record, with flops like The Golden Compass and The Invasion), and neither is director Baz Luhrmann, whose Moulin Rouge! topped out at a respectable but not blockbuster $55 million. So why make an epic romance (those don't do well either when they're not named Titanic) that costs $150 million? Oh, that's right, as 20th Century Fox will tell you, their investment was only $78 million. Doesn't matter; still not going to come even close to that. Aside from the money thing, though, the reviews were mixed. Expect a Cinematography or Costumes nomination, but Picture is out of the question.

W. What could be cooler than a biopic of a president who's still in office? Well, a lot of things, apparently. Critics scratched their heads over Oliver Stone's apparently sympathetic portrayal of Bush, Richard Dreyfuss (who played Cheney) bashed the movie on The View, and audiences, wrapped up wondering who the next president was going to be, didn't much care to revisit the old one. Josh Brolin still has an outside shot at a Best Actor nomination, but prospects beyond that are weak, weak, weak.

Burn After Reading. Was it ever a serious contender? Well, it was the Coen Bros. follow-up to their Oscar-sweeping No Country for Old Men, so, yes, it was hard to ignore. Once the movie came out, it made some nice bank, got some decent reviews, but was universally considered too lightweight to play with the big kids.

Towelhead. Oscar-winner Alan Ball (for the American Beauty screenplay) wrote and directed this controversy-baiting coming-of-age drama, but reviews skewed negative and audiences stayed away.

Miracle at St. Anna. Spike Lee decided to make a mainstream big-budget war movie about the African-American division of the army in World War II. Unfortunately, it was released in a crowded marketplace, went too wide too fast, and didn't have the kind of critical support that could have given it a better-orchestrated release plan.

Flash of Genius. Greg Kinnear starred in a heartwarming story about one man going up against a big corporation (Ford) that stole his invention. Too bad nobody saw it.

Blindness. All the pieces were in play on this one: acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener), stars Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Gael Garcia-Bernal, and a screenplay adapted from a critically adored book. But then reviews were wretched and everybody ignored it.

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This Year's Best Picture-Baiting Failures

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