The 32 greatest movies that derailed careers
Aug. 9, 2024When these movies hit theaters, some stars began to dim
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Not all movies are created equally. While some movies christen stars and directors as the next best thing, and sometimes overnight, some movies can ruin careers just as fast. Hollywood is an industry entirely cultivated on image, which can make the decision to act in or direct certain movies feel precarious and calculated like a game of chess. And like chess, one poor decision can lead to ruin. But which are the greatest movies that have actually derailed careers?
Whether some movies are actually so bad that the actors can’t ever escape their stank or misunderstood masterpieces that needed time and perspective to be positively reevaluated, these 32 movies heavily derailed the careers of their stars or directors. Everyone loves a good comeback story, but for many in Hollywood, they’re still waiting to overcome what these movies did to their reputations.
32. Wind (1992) and Jennifer Grey
The painfully unfunny and casually offensive flop The Love Guru was the nail in the coffin for Mike Myers' stardom throughout the 2000s. After rising through Saturday Night Live and launching hit film series like Wayne’s World, Austin Powers, and Shrek, Myers started taking hits to the face with the unpopular live-action adaptation of Dr. Seuss' seminal childrens' book The Cat in the Hat. In 2008, Myers wrote, directed, and starred in The Love Guru, a bizarre rom-com in which Myers appears as a celebrity guru tasked with spiritually reorienting the star player of the Toronto Maple Leafs. The movie bombed hard with both audiences and critics, and Myers' career never fully recovered afterward.
After leading the teen movie classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High and co-starring with Eddie Murphy on Beverly Hills Cop, Judge Reinhold was on a rocket ship to Hollywood stardom. But the actor quickly burned out before the ’80s even ended with the box office disaster Vice Versa, a strange family comedy where Reinhold plays a father who switches bodies with his own son via a magical relic. In a 1992 L.A. Times interview, Reinhold observed: “[Vice Versa] was really the end of my highfalutin Hollywood career … That’s when the phone stopped ringing.”
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WhenMarvel Studioswas riding the high of its interconnected Avengers franchise, the then-rival studio 20th Century Fox aimed to assert its movie rights to Marvel’s Fantastic Four with a dark and gritty reboot project. The result was, um, Fantastic Four (or Fant4stic Four, if you take the poster literally). Panned by critics as drab and dull and ignored by audiences because it wasn’t The Avengers, Fantastic Four suffered at least one major casualty: director Josh Trank. Amid the movie’s release and box office failure, Trank publicly sparred with the studio in the press for impeding his vision. The fallout damaged Trank’s reputation, landing him in the proverbial “director’s jail” for years.
Way before the term “nepo baby” was officially coined, Will Smith and son Jaden Smith brazenly gambled on themselves with the unpopular and mighty expensive M. Night Shyamalan sci-fi After Earth. The plot is nothing to write home about; the Smiths play a father and son (try not to act surprised) who survive on a dangerous, post-apocalyptic future Earth. But the biggest receiver of After Earth’s critical beatings was Jaden Smith, whose performance was widely panned. (Wrote The Atlantic: “[Jaden Smith] is entirely lacking in the big-screen charisma that made his father one of Hollywood’s major stars.") In the aftermath, Jaden Smith publicly refocused his efforts to music more than movies, though he still worked as an actor on shows like The Get Down and his own produced anime Neo Yokio. In father Will Smith’s memoir, the elder Smith wrote that After Earth led his son to feel betrayed by him, which led to his seeking emancipation at age 15.
Before comic book movies could make bank from off-beat titles like Guardians of the Galaxy, the bizarre 1986 film Howard the Duck waddled into the unsavory canon of “so bad it’s good” movies. Based on the satiricalMarvel Comicscharacter, Howard the Duck is a sci-fi comedy about a talking, cigar-smoking alien duck who falls in love with a rock singer. The singer is played by Lea Thompson, who one year earlier was riding high from her leading female role in the all-time classic Back to the Future. Though Thompson still had Back to the Future sequels to keep her busy and later starred in TV shows like Caroline in the City and Switched at Birth, Howard the Duck largely held back Thompson from flying as high as a DeLorean.
Few stars in Hollywood have had rollercoaster careers like John Travolta. His is a career marked by frequent highs and discouraging lows. But the baffling 2000 sci-fi movie Battlefield Earth, with discomforting origins in Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, permanently diminished Travolta’s star power for good. The movie was widely mocked for its poor execution and a dreadlocked Travolta in horrific Star Trek cosplay, rendering what could have been Travolta’s ticket into the realm of blockbusters anything but a worthwhile adventure. Travolta never stopped acting, but a bizarre appearance at the Oscars with “Adele Dizeem” has eclipsed everything else he’s done on camera since.
BeforeDisney’s Pirates of the Caribbean struck gold to revitalize the swashbuckler genre, there was Cutthroat Island, a movie that struck out A League of Their Own’s Geena Davis. Davis initially enjoyed stardom between the ’80s and ’90s, with a role in The Accidental Tourist that earned her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. After the hit movies Beetlejuice and A League of Their Own, Davis' momentum was hot until she appeared in the swashbuckler bomb Cutthroat Island, helmed by her then-husband Renny Harlin. Production on Cutthroat Island was chaos on the high seas, being wildly expensive, difficult to shoot, and one of the year’s biggest duds. The movie condemned Davis' career on the big screen, though she enjoyed relevance on TV with a Golden Globe-winning role in Commander in Chief and Grey’s Anatomy.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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