12 movies that featured Brad Pitt and were flops

I already said it William Goldman, the screenwriter of The engaged princess: in Hollywood, the only inescapable truth is that nobody knows anything. For example, anyone would say that the presence of Brad Pitt, With that name, with that talent and with that hanger, he is a sure guarantee that a film will do well with critics and at the box office. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As the figures reveal Babylon, the movie with which Damien Chazelle He’s taking a financial blow, Pitt can do great things, but he’s not yet capable of miracles. Something that can be verified with a mere glance at his career: from his origins as a young folder to his most recent and ‘author’ projects, the most popular actor in contemporary Hollywood knows well what it is to get hit.

‘The dark side of the sun’ (Bozidar Nikolic, 1988)

The most jinxed job in Brad Pitt’s entire filmography is also his first title as a leading actor, playing a young man who suffers from a rare skin disease. The Balkan War broke out during the filming of the film in Croatia, which forced the interruption of production: if Pitt had not been its protagonist, the dark side of the sun It wouldn’t even have had that direct-to-DVD release that it finally enjoyed (so to speak) in 1997.

‘Bloody class’ (Rospo Pallenberg, 1989)

After escaping being shot to pieces under shells in the former Yugoslavia, Brad went through a common ordeal for actors of his generation: playing a high school slasher (with a comic twist, in this case). Despite bearing the signature of the screenwriter of Excalibur and count on the charms of our hero, still unknown but already powerful, bloody class It did not collect a penny and was put to the test by critics.

‘Cool World: A blonde between two worlds’ (Ralph Bakshi, 1992)

Nine years after the endearing Tygra: Ice and Fire, and 14 after his adaptation of The Lord of the rings, Bakshi hit it big with this film in which Brad (a human detective trapped in an animated universe) resisted the seductions of the ‘cartoon’ Kim Basinger. The shoot was hell, the movie smashed at the box office, and surely our man found himself returning to fried chicken commercials after the release.

‘Kalifornia’ (Dominic Sena, 1993)

not even the presence of David Duchovny (then at the top thanks to the success of X-file) saved this film from sinking at the box office in which juliette lewis and a Pitt turned into a sex symbol thanks to his role in Thelma and Louise They played a couple of serial killers. practically forgotten, california remains today as one of the many films with which 90s Hollywood tried to replicate the success of Reservoir Dogs.

‘Love Point Blank’ (Tony Scott, 1993)

Speaking of Tarantino, here we have him, albeit as the author of a script full of phrases to remember. Even though point blank love It didn’t take long for it to become a cult film, its first box office results were disastrous, something that (for once) Brad Pitt didn’t care too much for: the presence of the actor in the film, playing the roommate of Christian Slater, it was just a cameo during which he improvised most of his dialogue.

‘Do you know Joe Black?’ (Martin Brest, 1998)

Thanks to Passion legends, Pitt already shone in the Olympus of carpet idols. And, thanks to his work in Seven Y Twelve Monkeys, he had begun to earn the stripes of a good actor. Thus, his work in this pestilent remake of holiday death (Mitchell Leisen, 1934) rocked a still promising career. To make matters worse, the bulk of the film’s American viewers only went to see it because the trailer for The Phantom Menace…

‘The murder of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford’ (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

In general, the nascent 21st century behaved very well with a Brad Pitt who consolidated his position as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. So, like so many other actors in his position, our hero decided to launch himself into producing ‘author’ films that, like this work by the future director of blonde, They gave it great reviews but disastrous box office sales. Pitt and Dominik repeated together, with similar results, in Kill them softly (2012).

‘The Counselor’ (Ridley Scott, 2013)

Some heretics (including certain members of this editorial staff) will affirm without hesitation that the counselor It is the best title of the recent filmography of RidleyScott, partly thanks to the work of its protagonist michael fassbender and a list of secondaries including Brad Pitt. Opinions aside, the film was a big hit at the box office: the script for cormac mccarthy (Road) He is not exactly one of those who make things easy for the viewer.

‘In front of the sea’ (Angelina Jolie, 2016)

“Family and work, oil and water”, goes the popular saying. Signing up for this film directed, written and starring his then-partner, Pitt went overboard with that great truth… and things turned out the way they did. Leaving aside some flaccid criticism, Oceanfront it was shot on a budget of 10 million dollars… and it grossed 3 million worldwide, leaving it as a failure for history.

‘Allies’ (Robert Zemeckis, 2016)

At this point, those who sign up for a Zemeckis film do so at their own risk. Something that Pitt and Marion Cotillard they learned, to their misfortune, when the director of Return to the future brought them together in this romantic thriller set in World War II. The tape not only failed to recover its budget, but also would have generated losses close to 90 million dollars.

‘Ad Astra’ (James Gray, 2019)

Did it go well for the author of Armageddon Time your sci-fi experiment? That’s a matter of taste, but one thing is clear: no matter how much Pitt appeared in it, a film described by Gray himself as “a mix of Apocalypse Now Y 2001″ it was not going to drag the masses. Its box office was below even the least optimistic forecasts, giving rise to a flop that, added to that of Chazelle with First Man, convinced studios that it was better to keep your feet on the ground.

‘Babylon’ (Damien Chazelle, 2023)

Tarantino aside, Brad Pitt hasn’t been doing very well lately, working with prestigious filmmakers. Despite those trailers that promise us an orgiastic look at the golden years of Hollywood, Babylon He has had to face new outbreaks of covid and the little interest of the public in seeing margot robbie Putting himself like Las Grecas: the collection of the tape does not even dream of approaching those 250 million dollars that it would need to cover expenses.

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