24 Biggest Movie Turkeys
As Thanksgiving approaches, stuff yourself on this platter of the 24 biggest, most famous movie turkeys — movies audiences had anticipated, expected, and even hoped to be Fresh on the Tomatometer, only to come out Rotten as branded by the critics. (Only movies made after Rotten Tomatoes came into existence, though! Because, Ishtar, we’re nice people.)
The amazingly monikered Florian Henckel Von Donnersmark made a huge debut on the world stage with Berlin Wall thriller The Lives of Others, which scored 93% with critics. His splashy American follow-up, The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, bombed at 20%. The movie was then mocked at the Golden Globes by host Ricky Gervais after its, ahem, prestigious and non-suspicious Best Picture nomination.
Tomas Alfredson, who directed beloved vampiric Let the Right One In and the Certified Fresh Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was able to attract a stacked cast for Snowman (including Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, J.K. Simmons, and Charlotte Gainsbourg), only for its critical hopes to melt away at 8%. Alfredson attributes the failure to having too much money and not enough time during production, leaving whole crucial passages of the book unfilmed.
Speakin’ of the Fassbend, Michael has had seven movies come out over the last two years, all but one Rotten (Alien: Covenant was Fresh, but didn’t seem like anybody really enjoyed it). We were hoping that Assassin’s Creed would break the video game movie curse, especially if you consider Fassbender produced it, the guy who did 2015’s Macbeth directed it, and Marion Cotillard was there somewhere, too. Alas, the film spends too much time in the present and not enough action scenes in old Spain jumping off church steeples into bales of hay.
2016, in fact, was the year that the video game movie curse could’ve been laid to waste. Four major adaptations were released into theaters — couldn’t just one of them have been Fresh? Beyond Assassin’s Creed, nobody was expecting much out of The Angry Birds Movie or Ratchet & Clank, so the waypoint was then pinned on Warcraft. It was directed by professed superfan Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), which turned out to be a detriment — too much fan service and granular lore with a truncated runtime left mainstream audiences in the lurch.
After two dour Superman movies from Zack Snyder, comic book fans were hoping to hang their cape on Suicide Squad for a little levity in the world of DC. Squad was the live-action debut of fan favorite Harley Quinn, it had Will Smith, the promotional material and trailers were on point, and director David Ayer had proven himself in other tough genres. Alas, it had the same incomprehensible plotting and muddled character treatment that plagued the preceding DCEU efforts.
Ridley Scott! Directing from an original script by Cormac McCarthy! What could go wrong? How about the fact that, despite his A-list status, every other movie Scott directs is actually Rotten? Or that McCarthy had never written a screenplay before, and his trademark gritty pontificating does not a good script make?
At one point, each Ben Affleck-directed movie was ranked 94%. That’s even more impressive than winning the big Oscar for a movie about a fake science-fiction movie (the closest that genre will ever get to Best Picture). So Live by Night, Affleck’s gangster period piece, had all the trappings of another success. And that’s all the more alarming when critics riddled it with a 35% score, leading to a $10 million domestic gross.
Patience measured by decades. An entire Expanded Universe created from the ashes of Alderaan by fans and professionals alike. A couple good video game tie-ins. For Jar Jar Binks and an early death for Darth Maul? Good thing The Matrix came out the same year.
Michael Mann’s made some spotty movies in his career, which would be more forgivable if he actually made more of them! As such, Blackhat, Mann’s dunderheaded technothriller and his first movie in six years (after the just-okay Public Enemies), remains his last statement in the film world. At least, until Enzo Ferrari comes out, which starts production next year.
Just two years into Rotten Tomatoes’ infancy, and four years after the groundbreaking Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s The Beach was a high-profile embarrassment that caused the director and his star Leonardo DiCaprio — still in the suffocating afterglow of Titanic — to hit the comeback trail. Boyle’s next movie would be zombie flick-revitalizer 28 Days Later, while DiCaprio bided his time subjugating Don’s Plum. Oh, and starting a fruitful working relationship with Martin Scorsese.
Nobody was clamoring for a new Die Hard, especially a PG-13 take 12 years after With a Vengeance. But it came. And it was pretty good! Even with Justin Long! So when another Die Hard reared its shiny head, audiences met it with…not excitement, exactly, but not nearly the trepidation that’s been attached to Bruce Willis movies of recent years. But how foolish were we! It would soon be clear as the color of night that here came another phoned-in Willis performance, a sad yippie-kai-meh to one of America’s most vital action icons.
“Is it just me, or do we actually know how to do this better than live-action crews do?” Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton humbly pondered in a New Yorker piece during production of John Carter (née Mars). Hopes were high for these Pixar directors to make good on breaking free of the animation “ghetto” (Brad Bird made Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol the year before), and rival executives were anticipating they’d be taken down a notch, especially for having the gall to adapt something as difficult and weird as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books. John Carter‘s anemic marketing and failure to break past the Fresh barrier led to a cosmic box office bust.
Brad Bird himself needed to prepare for a rough landing with Tomorrowland. Up to that point, every movie he directed had been Certified Fresh, including famously troubled Ratatouille, which he took over mid- production. The mysterious marketing campaign drummed up a lot of intrigue and interest for some classical sci- fi, though when critics and audiences planted themselves in theaters, they got a curiously empty, curiously Objectivist trifle.
H’wood has been drawing from the public domain well hardcore these past few years (think Jungle Book, think Tarzan, think too many movies with the word Origins in the title), so what did this movie with Charlie Hunnam as chav Arthur have going for it? Well, the director was Guy Ritchie, who was coming off of cult pleaser Man From U.N.C.L.E. and did a bang-up job updating Sherlock Holmes. (That one time, at least.) Did we mention Arthur as a chav? Oi! Ultimately, we’re calling this a major turkey because it presaged for all the turkeys that would quickly follow: Summer 2017 was a tastefully apocalyptic season as multiple Rotten blockbusters bombed in a row: Baywatch, Transformers: Is It The Fifth One?, and Pirates: The One That Just Came Out. Naturally, when we got covered in The New York Times, a major studio chief executive “declared flatly that his mission was to destroy the review- aggregation site.”
The year is 2004. It’s been 10 years since Walt Disney Animation’s last masterpiece, The Lion King. The Pixar new wave had changed the industry, and traditional animation was on its way out. Home on the Range was Disney’s attempt to match the high irreverence of 3D cartoons, which only alienated critics and audiences. The studio produced only computer animation from there on, save for 2009’s The Princess and the Frog, which, though Certified Fresh, would again fail to find a global audience.
A Spidey reboot so soon after Sam Raimi’s infamous Spider-Man 3? Sony ran the risk of audiences getting fed up being whipped around like so much wrist web around Manhattan, but that was before seeing how well Andrew Garfield slipped into the role in the Certified Fresh Amazing Spider-Man.. Then came the sequel, which, fittingly, had the same faults of Spider-Man 3: indifferent direction and way too many villains. It was enough to get Sony to tie a complicated knot with Marvel, and bring the character over to the MCU.
Harrison Ford back in a fedora? Daniel Craig in a major blockbuster post-Casino Royale? And if there was a director that could bring all this together in the high concept Cowboys & Aliens, why not Jon Faverau, the guy who turned a B-list Marvel superhero like Tony Stark into moviedom’s #1 attraction? Alas, C&A took its concept way too seriously.
The Village has its defenders, but Lady in the Water was a total dud. Maybe what M. Night Shayamalan needed was a less restrictive sandbox to mess around in. The marketing for The Happening played up that this was his first R-rated feature and kept the premise under wraps. As though Mark Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant is a joy that needed to be hidden from the world.
Okay, maaaaybe what Shayamalan needed was to make an epic! With lots of money! Based on a beloved television property! Just watch this to see how that turned out.
Like a case of collective Stockholm Syndrome, America was getting used to “Bennifer,” the pagan portmanteau denoting the holy unity of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. “Bennifer Spotted at Venice Farmers Market, Rejecting Wrinkled Squash,” the headlines read. “Bennifer Snorkeling Off Point Dume,” “Bennifer Anticipates Rise of Silver Lake Neighborhood as Hipster Enclave, Escorted Out of HOA Meeting,” and so on. So when negative chatter arose over Gigli, a monument to Bennifer’s enduring love, that the movie was actually a complete embarrassment, we thought, “Could it be? Truly? Gobble, gobble.”
The post-Pulp Fiction comeback of John Travolta came to an official, screeching, Dutch-angled end with Battlefield Earth, a supremely hokey sci-fi epic adapted from Scientology mastermind L. Ron Hubbard.
After directing Jurassic World to $1.5 billion and signing on to do the ninth Star Wars movie, Colin Trevorrow took a quick detour to make passion project The Book of Henry. It’s a manipulative, misconceived movie involving adult predators, dead kids and brain tumors, and Naomi Watts prowling the neighborhood with a sniper rifle. The movie choked on a 21% Tomatometer, and three months later, Trevorrow exited from directing Star Wars.
Another movie that informs us how to live, truly live, courtesy of characters who are afflicted with everything. Will Smith has a dead kid, and wears a beanie. Michael Pena has handsome man cancer. Kate Winslet is too old to have kids. Edward Norton is a cold and distant person. He’s also in this movie. The latter three team up to oust Smith from his own company, turning to three thespians pretending to be Death, Time, and Love. In a mawkish twist, they actually are those concepts in the flesh. Collateral Beauty is the feel good movie from Hollywood execs numb to reality.
This movie ended Pixar’s unprecedented 16-year Certified Fresh streak. Kachow!
