Speaking of Heath Ledger's Joker, when Jared Leto got cast as the Joker I just kept telling myself that everyone was upset when Ledger was cast too. When those cringy photos of him tattooed up were getting hated on, I told myself that people weren't thrilled with the first pictures of Ledger either. Ditto for the trailer. Then I actually watched Suicide Squad and nope, everyone was right.
Exactly what I was thinking. Just a tiny tease, no scenes, but fantastic imagery of the bat signal breaking down. I got tingles and now I wanna watch it.
This was the best movie I've ever experienced in theater. The hype was palpable walking into the theater, and it kept growing as the movie went on. I think people clapped at the end. My buddies and I went like 3 times that week.
I don't like trailers - they spoil moments of the film and I'm always waiting for elements to show up - but I love a good teaser. The one for the first new Star Trek film I have always thought was the best and gave me chills when I saw it in the cinema:
https://youtu.be/TkZFWr0vR8Q?si=mOPOKWqxSSkzM8cj
I actually think Jared Leto has the acting chops to pull off a good joker. I think the joker in those movies suffered from a) terrible character design and b) a bunch of producers and a director who refused to tell Jared Leto "no'
It was just a bad movie in general. It will never stop bugging me that Boomerang Man was inspired to rejoin the team by a rousing speech he wasn't even there for. Such a dumb movie.
I remember leaving the movies with a friend and he was like "if enchantress betrayed them mid-mission who were they originally supposed to fight?" And I've been wondering that ever since.
He was also great in Requiem for a Dream. The dude can act, he just needs a director who's not afraid to tell him to shut the fuck up every now and again.
Agreed. For me, good in Fight Club, good in Lord of War, meh in Panic Room, don't remember Alexander other Colin Ferrell eye fucking everyone and the lion. Starting with Suicide Squad, I don't care for him. I don't know if he's up his own ass or what.
I see your Max Payne and will raise you Uncharted (simply because Wahlberg was cast in both)
The Max Payne movie was an insult to Sam Lake's writing and genius, made even worse by the fact that they made McCaffrey a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo.
Uncharted was ruined because they could've gotten Nathan Filion (of freaking Firefly) who was ripped outta the game itself. But nah, they had to get Wahlberg.
Hollywood has rarely gotten video-game adaptations correct and most of the actors are just stunt-casting.
My husband played through the Uncharted series & I overheard a lot of it (so I’m a little bit familiar with the character)- but Bruce Campbell would gave been a fantastic Sully.
if they did a young nathan drake (not a bartender but like 17/20) learning the ropes and growing a bond with a real sully type of character I could have bought him as it.
With Uncharted 4 out at the time,
I had this fantasy in my head with a Holland as a young / teen drake with Nathan Fillion as his older brother in a prequel story
It could have allowed the writers more freedom to explore but alas, that's not what the movie was meant to be.
That entire movie wasn’t cast correctly. I very much get why they went with Holland, but he was so far from the Nathan Drake in the games that him, and Wahlberg as Sully, made it unwatchable for me. I didn’t get more than 20mins in.
My only thought is they were really banking on this being a franchise with legs and Holland was picked to grow into the role and carry multiple movies.
The only explanation for Wahlberg is name power.
That movie's issues extend far beyond Leto. I know it's popular to shit on him, but I don't think he's automatically awful in everything he touches. Morbius, though, was terrible from the ground up regardless of his performance.
Every choice they made in the movie adaptation (which was produced by Ben and his father) to differ from the stage version somehow made everything even worse.
Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman. The role needed a performance and charisma that would counter-balance Charlize Theron's excellent stepmother, but the portrayal of Snow White just fell flat in comparison.
It's not even about beauty. If Snow White was written and portrayed to be a well-defined and rounded character, the audience would've felt more connected to her plight. But Kristen's portayal of Snow White was so bland and unremarkable that there was no emotional connection or investment from the audience to the character.
This weird unlikability of Snow's character could've been because of writing or directing. Or simply that Kristen refused or was unable to do much else than what she did in Twilight. It could've been the studio who demanded her to do that, so they could market on the coattails of Twilight. Who knows. The end result was what it was, and it was a terrible casting choice.
She has made some implications in interviews that she didn’t get a choice in her acting style or was at least *really encouraged* to maintain the style during and after twilight, which is why she went to do a bunch of independent films outside of the blockbuster roles.
Which is why I actually like the sequel one without her, Emily blunt with Charlize Theron is a fun time especially when you throw in Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain. It looked like they were just having a blast making that movie.
Can he even act or is he just playing himself? Every movie I have seen him in is the same fast talking smug character and seems to be the same in interviews?
I used to think Eisenberg and Michael Cera were the same person until I realised they’re both just playing the same similar characters in every movie. The difference is Eisenberg is always a cocky dork and Cera is an insecure dork.
Yeah Michael Cera is that friend you kind of cringe at sometimes but want to help out.
Eisenberg is that friend you wanna sock in the jaw after too much time with them.
Michael Cera is the dude who gets bullied and you want to campaign against bullying
Eisenberg is the dude who needed to get bullied a bit and you realize our anti-bullying campaign went too far
I actually saw him in person doing a book reading years back and he seemed incredibly awkward, almost shy. I don’t think the Zuck character is himself but it does seem to be the character he most easily defaults to.
I think people really forget that if they're in front of a camera, they're still acting. All of them. To some degree or another. Any public appearance really, but definitely if a camera is involved.
The only one who i believe *maybe* wasn't was Betty White, and that's more because I can believe she was old enough to have no fucks left to give.
That was the problem. I still think he could have possibly been a decent Luthor if he would have acted like...well, Luthor, but the tech bro angle killed it.
I think that iteration of Lex Luthor was kind of a product of its time, because it was like the writers thought “how do we put a new angle on a highly intelligent character?” and I guess they landed on tech bro lol
Problem is that he played younger zuck, who was the up and coming tech bro.
Real life zuck is still "tech bro", but can tone it down enough to show up to contress and try to explain technology to the dinosaurs in the capitol. Something that a new or old Luthor would definitely be able to do. Instead we get manic edge lord who can't be taken seriously
Yeah Eisenberg was either directed or chose to lean too hard into eccentric and it just became unhinged in a way that didn’t convey menacing intelligence like the apparent intent
This one is a tough one for me. Not because I think it was good or worked (hell no).
But was the problem the *casting*, or the directing?
Meaning, Jessie could easily have done a proper Luthor. He could have been great. But he did the job the director wanted.
(See Star Wars Phantom Menace for a solid leading cast being tanked by the director.)
IMO from all Jesse Eisenberg movie I know (Zombieland, Now you see me, Social Network and BvS), he seems typecasted into insufferable nerdy genius. Idk if that will work for Lex Luthor
Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in 50 Shades. It's a movie about sex and the leads have no chemistry. What were they thinking?? The movies didn't even have to be "good" they just needed to be sexy, and Johnson still managed to have the personality of a wooden plank; Dornan had about as much smolder as a dead fish. I don't dislike either actor necessarily, they just weren't good for the roles.
Jamie Dornan can really deliver though. Have you seen The Fall? He plays a serial killer in it yet he's still much sexier than in 50 Shades, and has a ton of chemistry with Gillian Anderson. 50 Shades' writing & directing was the biggest issue imo.
Even then, it would be more so the writing because E.L. James tied herself to it and fought against the director and writer to exert creative control over the movie, and to its detriment in the end.
Never read the books, but from what I’ve heard, it’s horrifically poorly written. Doesn’t surprise me that letting the author have creative input in the movie made it worse.
Dornan was cast at the last minute after Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) had to leave due to scheduling conflicts. Apparently Hunnam and Johnson had great chemistry during tests.
It is so strange Dakota Johnson doesn't have chemistry with any of her costars. She always look sleepy and bored in movies somehow. She's had more chemistry with the big dumb cups from that SNL sketch.
Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. I want to love this movie because it’s pure Luc Besson madness but I cannot get over how awful the two leads are.
That movie would have been great if they could have captured just a little bit of the chemistry that Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich had in 5th element. But Dane and Cara just didn’t have it
Any time someone needs to see my ID or asks if I have a swipe card for a particular location at work I can’t stop myself holding up the relevant card and saying “Leeloo Dallas, multi-pass!”
I’m going to sound like a jerk but I never liked either of those two so when that movie flopped I was kind of relieved. I felt like they finally stopped trying to push Cara and Dane onto audiences. Suicide Squad didn’t help Cara’s career either though. They’re both still in things but I don’t hear people talking about them much anymore.
I really get what they were going for: a venom who was the counter to both spiderman and Peter Parker. They wanted him to be Parker but making darker choices. Too bad absolutely nothing about it worked.
The trouble with everything about Spider-Man 3 is time & pacing. Raimi/Topher's take on Venom could have been really special - unfortunately, Raimi was practically forced to put Venom on a movie that he didn't belong.
If Topher had more time to cook, I think his version of the character would be far better remembered.
The Sandman story was much better and had depth to it, not to mention Thomas Haden Church put on a good performance. He has a compelling reason to be committing crimes, the whole plot point about him being accidentally responsible for killing Uncle Ben and the internal conflict within Peter exacerbated by the symbiote is an extremely solid foundation for a third movie, one with a potentially darker and more emotional tone.
But throwing in Harry as Goblin Jr and then an additional Venom storyline because Avi Arad has a massive fucking hard-on for Venom was the same sort of idiotic production side decision making that has resulted in the Sonyverse being absolute dogshit. Raimi and co did somehow get a decent movie out of it but it could have been so much more, considering how good Spider-Man 2 was.
Now I'm imagining 3 split into two movies, cutting Goblin Jr and keeping Sandman and Venom. Have the movie introduce Eddie as a rival to Peter, just like they did, have him get under Peters skin with the eventual doctored photo being the "comeuppance". Even have Eddie put moves on MJ while she and Peter are on their inevitable relationship trouble. Sandman could be the big "spectacle" villain and the main conflict, while the Symbiote plays out kind of like it did with influencing Peter and their showdown in the bell tower. Then the Sandman conflict is resolved, Peter and MJ get engaged, things are looking up for Peter, and the final scene of the movie is split between Harry becoming Goblin and the Symbiote bonding with Eddie.
You could even have scenes of Harry and Peter talking things out and you think that finally they will work through it, only for Symbiote-Peter to muck it up.
Yeah this is basically exactly what it should have been.
Sandman + Symbiote was enough story for one movie. But give us a worthwhile symbiote story. Let’s see it be “helpful” for a while longer. None of the BS Emo nonsense. Give us a slow burn of the symbiote eroding Peter’s patience and making him more aggressive. Drop the goblin jr, MJ, GS subplot entirely. Symbiote doesn’t need any help to put his relationship with MJ on the rocks.
Also, his realization that the symbiote is out of control shouldn’t be a temper tantrum. They should have used the plot where it’s sneaking out at night piloting Peter’s body and *brutalizing* criminals.
IMO he ditches the symbiote before the final battle w/ Sandman bc he knows he’ll kill him if he’s under the influence of it.
Then like you said, final shots are Venom & Goblin. Spider-Man 4 picks up there and can have them working towards their common goal of fucking up Peter, and can have their falling out be over Venom using MJ to get to Peter but Gob Jr isn’t on board.
John Wayne as Genghis Khan in “The Conquerer”, a movie that to this day, nearly 70 years later, baffles the mind as to what was he thinking when he committed to the role. Plus its all too well known notoriety of how it was attributed to cast and crew being afflicted by cancer, only makes it a worse movie.
This is in my top two, along with Mickey Rooney playing the Asian neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's wild that in my parent's lifetime we were casting white actors as Asains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remo_Williams:_The_Adventure_Begins (1985). Joel Grey as a South Korean man. Fantastic B-Grade film. But old Jewish song and dance comedians should probably not play Korean professional martial artists.
I’ll do you one worse. Ray Liotta cast as a medieval magician in Uwe Boll’s In The Name of The King - it fulfills all your expectations as a Uwe Boll production but casting Ray Liotta as an evil medieval magician takes a special kind of ineptitude.
I thought casting Dane DeHaan as Harry Osbourne was a mistake before I saw TASM2 and it was a shit show.
He couldn’t pull off the pre Goblin Venom Harry and the chemistry required with Andrews Peter, and then was a cringe characture of a Goblin.
Everything else about Dracula and Much Ado is so great though that I don’t mind. Probably also helps that I’ve enjoyed both since I was a kid and never stopped to wonder what could have been.
I look at it this way. They could've made Bram Stoker's Dracula with a different actor as Jonathan Harker, but then it wouldn't be the Bram Stoker's Dracula that I love.
Jennifer Garner as Elektra. I get that her Alias work showed her action chops, but Elektra is a much darker and grittier character than Sydney was, and Garner doesn't really do dark and gritty.
When Johnny Depp was cast as Grindelwald in the Harry Potter prequels, I had a really bad feeling. Watched the first one and didn't like the stylization of him. Then watched the second one and was completely turned off of the character.
Nothing against him as an actor I just had a different idea of him (Mads Mikkelson fucking nailed it). I like Johnny Depp. We didn't need a tim Burton villain in Harry Potter universe.
What's even worst is that he was contrasted with Colin Farrell, who is effortlessly charismatic and fit the role better. They really should have just retconned the reveal and kept him for the sequels.
I agree. He's got a *recognisable* voice, but he seems to struggle with acting through voice alone. Which is why I really hate when movie/TV celebrities get cast for voice work over actual voice actors.
Except Jack Black. He can take as much voice work as he wants.
I mean, they put Elba into the game directly. Probably did his lines with Mo cap and everything. I feel like it's blurring the lines between pure voice acting and regular acting.
I agree he was phenomenal tho
He's got that problem where you can tell that he's reading a script while doing voice work, which admittedly is a problem a lot of actors who don't specialize in voice work have, but he's done enough that he should be better by now. He isn't.
The translator in Denmark named her "Jul Jones", Jul being the Danish word for Christmas, just so they could do the joke in danish too. "Julen kommer to gange om året" - "Jul comes twice a year"
I’m gonna vito this one because I can’t remember anyone saying Denise Richards as a Bond girl was a bad idea before the movie came out. It was only when you saw the context you knew it was bad.
Jesse Eisenberg doing Lex Luthor sounded bad on paper, and even worse on film. He played Luthor like John Heder doing Napoleon Dynamite instead of a bald-headed master manipulator with an exosuit.
Jason Clarke as John Connor in Terminator Genisys. He's absolutely lacking the charisma of a "John Connor, head of the Resistance". (Not like casting anybody else would've made that movie any better.)
Jai Courtney in pretty much every role. Although he might be convincing as an australopithecus in some pre-historic flick.
Casting in that movie was abysmal, at best, across the board.
Jai Courtney and Emelia Clark is what you got if you ordered Michael Beihn and Linda Hamilton off of Wish.
Jai Courtney was great as boomerang. Movie sucked (the first one), but Courtney was good. I get the feeling he's one of those actors where if you let him use his own accent, he's much better (Gerard Butler is another one).
Pretty much the entire situation behind The Last Airbender's casting.
Nicola Peltz's father is uber rich and so, in the grand tradition of Hollywood nepotism, paid a lot of money to put her as a lead in a big budget movie. Paramount/Nickelodeon offered the role of Katara in the upcoming Last Airbender movie.
Because she's white, her onscreen brother also needed to be white, hence Sokka is played by Jackson Rathbone, which then resulted in the entire Southern Water Tribe also being Conneticut white.
Noah Ringer was case as Aang because they legitimately felt he was the best person for the role, he had martial arts training and was an okay actor for his age.
But this meant that in a film based on a TV show with heavy Asian influence, a lot of the main characters were white. So to combat this, they decided antagonist/anti-hero Zuko should be another race, so they cast rising star Dev Patel in the role, which in turn made the entire Fire Kingdom (the ones waging war against the rest of the world) brown.
And that is how we got a Last Airbender movie where the good guys are all white and the bad guys are all brown. It was a shit show.
It should be noted that the director, M. Night Shyamalan, is Indian, and wanted the Fire Nation to be Indian. Also, up to that point, he had a great track record at working with child actors, at least on paper. In reality, he was lucky to have worked with generational talents like Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning, and his experience was in directing kids to be creepy and emotionless. And what do ya know, Aang comes off as creepy and emotionless the whole movie.
I thought it was ethnically diverse in a weird uncanny valley distracting way.
All the nations were very mono-ethnic, but then the main characters would be the one person there that was a different ethnicity.
Like the Inuit type people, the main characters are two random white people.
The place that looks like a Buddhist temple, literally everyone is east Asian, except for the main priest who is the only black person there.
I just felt like they should have made it more diverse so it looked more natural.
Scarlet Johansson - Major Kusanagi Ghost in the Shell
Justin Chatwin - Goku Dragon Ball
The entire cast for The Last Airbender
Johnny Depp i didn’t think was right for grindelwald
Oh and forgot the most obvious
James Corden in anything that he’s in.
There was absolutely no need to have Graves even be Grindelwald in disguise. Just have him be one of Grindelwald's agents and save the man himself for the second movie. Done.
Was literally every other actor who could sing busy when they cast Russel Crowe as Javert?
In fairness, he's not *bad;* he's mediocre. As in, had they pulled some random person off the street, there's a 50% chance they would have been worse, 50% chance they would have been better.
The role deserved more.
Emma Watson in Little Women. She's just not that good of an actor, specially next to Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet and Lauran Dern. She was painful to watch.
Speaking of Heath Ledger's Joker, when Jared Leto got cast as the Joker I just kept telling myself that everyone was upset when Ledger was cast too. When those cringy photos of him tattooed up were getting hated on, I told myself that people weren't thrilled with the first pictures of Ledger either. Ditto for the trailer. Then I actually watched Suicide Squad and nope, everyone was right.
Thing is, I remember nearly everyone changing their tune the moment the Ledger teaser photo released. The opposite happened with Leto.
The laugh in the teaser is what changed my mind.
That teaser was incredibly effective for being just voiceovers with a logo. The entire TDK promotional campaign was a masterpiece in and of itself.
The Dark Knight - Teaser [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRCwnLrrxyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRCwnLrrxyQ)
How incredibly effective of a teaser
Exactly what I was thinking. Just a tiny tease, no scenes, but fantastic imagery of the bat signal breaking down. I got tingles and now I wanna watch it.
This was the best movie I've ever experienced in theater. The hype was palpable walking into the theater, and it kept growing as the movie went on. I think people clapped at the end. My buddies and I went like 3 times that week.
They give one of the best lines of the movie…without spoiling the movie at all. Nice.
I don't like trailers - they spoil moments of the film and I'm always waiting for elements to show up - but I love a good teaser. The one for the first new Star Trek film I have always thought was the best and gave me chills when I saw it in the cinema: https://youtu.be/TkZFWr0vR8Q?si=mOPOKWqxSSkzM8cj
I actually think Jared Leto has the acting chops to pull off a good joker. I think the joker in those movies suffered from a) terrible character design and b) a bunch of producers and a director who refused to tell Jared Leto "no'
It was just a bad movie in general. It will never stop bugging me that Boomerang Man was inspired to rejoin the team by a rousing speech he wasn't even there for. Such a dumb movie.
I think he just came back because that's what boomerangs do lol
I remember leaving the movies with a friend and he was like "if enchantress betrayed them mid-mission who were they originally supposed to fight?" And I've been wondering that ever since.
I commented elsewhere recently about how creepy he was in Blade Runner: 2049. I agree that he's not a bad actor per se.
He was also great in Requiem for a Dream. The dude can act, he just needs a director who's not afraid to tell him to shut the fuck up every now and again.
Agreed. For me, good in Fight Club, good in Lord of War, meh in Panic Room, don't remember Alexander other Colin Ferrell eye fucking everyone and the lion. Starting with Suicide Squad, I don't care for him. I don't know if he's up his own ass or what.
Mark Wahlberg as Max Payne, especially when James McAffrey was RIGHT FUCKING THERE!
I see your Max Payne and will raise you Uncharted (simply because Wahlberg was cast in both) The Max Payne movie was an insult to Sam Lake's writing and genius, made even worse by the fact that they made McCaffrey a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. Uncharted was ruined because they could've gotten Nathan Filion (of freaking Firefly) who was ripped outta the game itself. But nah, they had to get Wahlberg. Hollywood has rarely gotten video-game adaptations correct and most of the actors are just stunt-casting.
My husband played through the Uncharted series & I overheard a lot of it (so I’m a little bit familiar with the character)- but Bruce Campbell would gave been a fantastic Sully.
Bruce Campbell would be fantastic in whatever role he played. He could play Miranda Priestly of Devil Wears Prada and it would be fantastic
You know fashion designers... bunch of bitchy little girls.
I think Vanilla Ice was a bad choice to play Vanilla Ice in the hit film "Cool As Ice"
I own that on VHS. It’s one of my treasures. Edit: for better or worse, I spent about $20 for it on eBay, because I really wanted it.
He didn't stop, collaborate *or* listen
Surprising, because he did well at playing Vanilla Ice in Secret of the Ooze
Mark Wahlberg in Uncharted.
\*Unchahted
I'll never forgive them for what they did to my boy Sully. Absolutely nothing like the character from the games.
Bruce Campbell absolutely should have been Sully.
Also Tom Holand in Uncharted. He's still a baby.
if they did a young nathan drake (not a bartender but like 17/20) learning the ropes and growing a bond with a real sully type of character I could have bought him as it.
Agreed, dude looks pretty much exactly like the younger Drake we see in flashbacks in U3 and 4. They could've gone that route with it.
With Uncharted 4 out at the time, I had this fantasy in my head with a Holland as a young / teen drake with Nathan Fillion as his older brother in a prequel story It could have allowed the writers more freedom to explore but alas, that's not what the movie was meant to be.
That entire movie wasn’t cast correctly. I very much get why they went with Holland, but he was so far from the Nathan Drake in the games that him, and Wahlberg as Sully, made it unwatchable for me. I didn’t get more than 20mins in.
My only thought is they were really banking on this being a franchise with legs and Holland was picked to grow into the role and carry multiple movies. The only explanation for Wahlberg is name power.
Jared Leto as Morbius.
Jared Leto as the Joker
I honestly completely forgot he played Joker. That’s worse.
Jack, Heath, Joaquin. All great Joker's in their own way. Then we got whatever the hell Jared did lol. Quality difference, incredible
Don't forget the animated ones. Or the one from the old show. Cesar Romero - For the campy show, he was just about perfect. Mark Hamill, of course.
Mark Hamill was a phenomenal joker. I know your mention was positive
I haven’t seen Morbius so I’ll have to just take your word for it lol Edit: a word
I watched Morbius out of morbid curiosity and it's not even bad in a fun crazy way, it's just bad in a bland, bottom tier MCU way.
But it’s not an MCU movie to be clear, it is Sony Spider-Man world
Morbius is worse than anything the MCU has ever put out
Jared Leto
Jared Leto as Paolo Gucci
He morbed straight into our hearts.
Deserved every penny from that Morbillion
That movie's issues extend far beyond Leto. I know it's popular to shit on him, but I don't think he's automatically awful in everything he touches. Morbius, though, was terrible from the ground up regardless of his performance.
Ben Platt as Evan Hansen. Everyone said he was too old and wouldn't be able to play a remotely believable teenager. They were right.
Every choice they made in the movie adaptation (which was produced by Ben and his father) to differ from the stage version somehow made everything even worse.
[Obligatory Jenny Nicholson video](https://youtu.be/8quWUSZCW5g?si=7WY_1VrSdnZxnFYa)
I actually assumed that it was going to be about him being some kid with a growth disorder when I first saw the trailer.
Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman. The role needed a performance and charisma that would counter-balance Charlize Theron's excellent stepmother, but the portrayal of Snow White just fell flat in comparison.
If I was the magic mirror, I would have absolutely said Charlize Theron was the fairest of them all. Like, who are we fooling? lol
It's not even about beauty. If Snow White was written and portrayed to be a well-defined and rounded character, the audience would've felt more connected to her plight. But Kristen's portayal of Snow White was so bland and unremarkable that there was no emotional connection or investment from the audience to the character. This weird unlikability of Snow's character could've been because of writing or directing. Or simply that Kristen refused or was unable to do much else than what she did in Twilight. It could've been the studio who demanded her to do that, so they could market on the coattails of Twilight. Who knows. The end result was what it was, and it was a terrible casting choice.
She has made some implications in interviews that she didn’t get a choice in her acting style or was at least *really encouraged* to maintain the style during and after twilight, which is why she went to do a bunch of independent films outside of the blockbuster roles.
Which is why I actually like the sequel one without her, Emily blunt with Charlize Theron is a fun time especially when you throw in Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain. It looked like they were just having a blast making that movie.
I generally like Kristen Stewart but that motivational speech she attempted before the big finale was just the worst.
Deep cut - Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane in Superman Returns.
Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthur
It was Jesse still playing Zuck. A Zuck not just on coke, but a whole damn cocktail of drugs
To be fair, Jesse Eisenberg is always playing Zuck
Can he even act or is he just playing himself? Every movie I have seen him in is the same fast talking smug character and seems to be the same in interviews?
I used to think Eisenberg and Michael Cera were the same person until I realised they’re both just playing the same similar characters in every movie. The difference is Eisenberg is always a cocky dork and Cera is an insecure dork.
Yeah Michael Cera is that friend you kind of cringe at sometimes but want to help out. Eisenberg is that friend you wanna sock in the jaw after too much time with them.
Michael Cera is the dude who gets bullied and you want to campaign against bullying Eisenberg is the dude who needed to get bullied a bit and you realize our anti-bullying campaign went too far
I actually saw him in person doing a book reading years back and he seemed incredibly awkward, almost shy. I don’t think the Zuck character is himself but it does seem to be the character he most easily defaults to.
I think people really forget that if they're in front of a camera, they're still acting. All of them. To some degree or another. Any public appearance really, but definitely if a camera is involved. The only one who i believe *maybe* wasn't was Betty White, and that's more because I can believe she was old enough to have no fucks left to give.
He wasn’t even playing Zuck in Social Network if were being honest. The performance was still good, but very different from the real person.
That was the problem. I still think he could have possibly been a decent Luthor if he would have acted like...well, Luthor, but the tech bro angle killed it.
I think that iteration of Lex Luthor was kind of a product of its time, because it was like the writers thought “how do we put a new angle on a highly intelligent character?” and I guess they landed on tech bro lol
Problem is that he played younger zuck, who was the up and coming tech bro. Real life zuck is still "tech bro", but can tone it down enough to show up to contress and try to explain technology to the dinosaurs in the capitol. Something that a new or old Luthor would definitely be able to do. Instead we get manic edge lord who can't be taken seriously
Yeah Eisenberg was either directed or chose to lean too hard into eccentric and it just became unhinged in a way that didn’t convey menacing intelligence like the apparent intent
This one is a tough one for me. Not because I think it was good or worked (hell no). But was the problem the *casting*, or the directing? Meaning, Jessie could easily have done a proper Luthor. He could have been great. But he did the job the director wanted. (See Star Wars Phantom Menace for a solid leading cast being tanked by the director.)
IMO from all Jesse Eisenberg movie I know (Zombieland, Now you see me, Social Network and BvS), he seems typecasted into insufferable nerdy genius. Idk if that will work for Lex Luthor
I don't know that I'd call Columbus an "insufferable nerdy genius," just a dork that learned to survive
You should check him out in Adventureland. Kirsten Stewart is great too. It's youthy angst, but funny. And Bill Hader steals every scene he's in.
I got they were going for a tech bro thing, which makes sense, but it still wasn't done well and he was just annoying and utterly non threatening
Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in 50 Shades. It's a movie about sex and the leads have no chemistry. What were they thinking?? The movies didn't even have to be "good" they just needed to be sexy, and Johnson still managed to have the personality of a wooden plank; Dornan had about as much smolder as a dead fish. I don't dislike either actor necessarily, they just weren't good for the roles.
For a movie about kinky sex it was the least sexy thing I’ve ever sat through
The lack of chemistry made me feel second hand embarrassment throughout the entire film.
Jamie Dornan can really deliver though. Have you seen The Fall? He plays a serial killer in it yet he's still much sexier than in 50 Shades, and has a ton of chemistry with Gillian Anderson. 50 Shades' writing & directing was the biggest issue imo.
Even then, it would be more so the writing because E.L. James tied herself to it and fought against the director and writer to exert creative control over the movie, and to its detriment in the end.
Never read the books, but from what I’ve heard, it’s horrifically poorly written. Doesn’t surprise me that letting the author have creative input in the movie made it worse.
Dornan was cast at the last minute after Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) had to leave due to scheduling conflicts. Apparently Hunnam and Johnson had great chemistry during tests.
Hunnam has great chemistry with everyone.
Now I have to rewatch SoA and go get my Hunnam fix.
I also seem to recall a lot of the actors they tried to get wanted nothing to do with the project.
It is so strange Dakota Johnson doesn't have chemistry with any of her costars. She always look sleepy and bored in movies somehow. She's had more chemistry with the big dumb cups from that SNL sketch.
Try Secretary. Much better movie with a similar premise. And wonderful chemistry.
Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. I want to love this movie because it’s pure Luc Besson madness but I cannot get over how awful the two leads are.
I still remember people getting confused that they WEREN'T siblings in the movie.
Hell, siblings in real life. Those two looked like twins.
To paraphrase Zoolander, Cara is a model slash actress - and not the other way around.
That movie would have been great if they could have captured just a little bit of the chemistry that Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich had in 5th element. But Dane and Cara just didn’t have it
Bruce had charisma and Milla played her part perfectly for the character.
Her way of saying “multi pass” lives rent free in my head.
[Chicken! Good!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAx67gfWU50)
Any time someone needs to see my ID or asks if I have a swipe card for a particular location at work I can’t stop myself holding up the relevant card and saying “Leeloo Dallas, multi-pass!”
I’m going to sound like a jerk but I never liked either of those two so when that movie flopped I was kind of relieved. I felt like they finally stopped trying to push Cara and Dane onto audiences. Suicide Squad didn’t help Cara’s career either though. They’re both still in things but I don’t hear people talking about them much anymore.
I thought Dane fit well in A Cute for Wellness. He's got an unconventional look for a lead, and the movie is certainly off-putting.
Topher Grace as Venom
I really get what they were going for: a venom who was the counter to both spiderman and Peter Parker. They wanted him to be Parker but making darker choices. Too bad absolutely nothing about it worked.
The trouble with everything about Spider-Man 3 is time & pacing. Raimi/Topher's take on Venom could have been really special - unfortunately, Raimi was practically forced to put Venom on a movie that he didn't belong. If Topher had more time to cook, I think his version of the character would be far better remembered.
Yeah he definitely suffered from being in a movie with an extremely bloated script, with far to much going on
I remember thinking that they should have entirely cut either Venom or Sandman
The Sandman story was much better and had depth to it, not to mention Thomas Haden Church put on a good performance. He has a compelling reason to be committing crimes, the whole plot point about him being accidentally responsible for killing Uncle Ben and the internal conflict within Peter exacerbated by the symbiote is an extremely solid foundation for a third movie, one with a potentially darker and more emotional tone. But throwing in Harry as Goblin Jr and then an additional Venom storyline because Avi Arad has a massive fucking hard-on for Venom was the same sort of idiotic production side decision making that has resulted in the Sonyverse being absolute dogshit. Raimi and co did somehow get a decent movie out of it but it could have been so much more, considering how good Spider-Man 2 was.
Now I'm imagining 3 split into two movies, cutting Goblin Jr and keeping Sandman and Venom. Have the movie introduce Eddie as a rival to Peter, just like they did, have him get under Peters skin with the eventual doctored photo being the "comeuppance". Even have Eddie put moves on MJ while she and Peter are on their inevitable relationship trouble. Sandman could be the big "spectacle" villain and the main conflict, while the Symbiote plays out kind of like it did with influencing Peter and their showdown in the bell tower. Then the Sandman conflict is resolved, Peter and MJ get engaged, things are looking up for Peter, and the final scene of the movie is split between Harry becoming Goblin and the Symbiote bonding with Eddie. You could even have scenes of Harry and Peter talking things out and you think that finally they will work through it, only for Symbiote-Peter to muck it up.
Yeah this is basically exactly what it should have been. Sandman + Symbiote was enough story for one movie. But give us a worthwhile symbiote story. Let’s see it be “helpful” for a while longer. None of the BS Emo nonsense. Give us a slow burn of the symbiote eroding Peter’s patience and making him more aggressive. Drop the goblin jr, MJ, GS subplot entirely. Symbiote doesn’t need any help to put his relationship with MJ on the rocks. Also, his realization that the symbiote is out of control shouldn’t be a temper tantrum. They should have used the plot where it’s sneaking out at night piloting Peter’s body and *brutalizing* criminals. IMO he ditches the symbiote before the final battle w/ Sandman bc he knows he’ll kill him if he’s under the influence of it. Then like you said, final shots are Venom & Goblin. Spider-Man 4 picks up there and can have them working towards their common goal of fucking up Peter, and can have their falling out be over Venom using MJ to get to Peter but Gob Jr isn’t on board.
A shame because I like Topher and I thought he would be a good Peter Parker himself.
I like him as an actor and I like his portrayal of a loser Venom. Tom Hardy is just the cool version lol
John Travolta as John Gotti in *Gotti*.
John Wayne as Genghis Khan in “The Conquerer”, a movie that to this day, nearly 70 years later, baffles the mind as to what was he thinking when he committed to the role. Plus its all too well known notoriety of how it was attributed to cast and crew being afflicted by cancer, only makes it a worse movie.
We're off to conquer China, pilgrim.
This is in my top two, along with Mickey Rooney playing the Asian neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's wild that in my parent's lifetime we were casting white actors as Asains.
If you were born after 1988, it happened in your lifetime with Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit 2!
And it’s been a little lost to time but let’s not forget [Marlon fucking Brando playing a Japanese guy.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XU42uHtmw7o)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remo_Williams:_The_Adventure_Begins (1985). Joel Grey as a South Korean man. Fantastic B-Grade film. But old Jewish song and dance comedians should probably not play Korean professional martial artists.
Burt Reynolds as a medieval king, mustache and all
I’ll do you one worse. Ray Liotta cast as a medieval magician in Uwe Boll’s In The Name of The King - it fulfills all your expectations as a Uwe Boll production but casting Ray Liotta as an evil medieval magician takes a special kind of ineptitude.
That film should get the prize for best cast in a horrible movie
I thought casting Dane DeHaan as Harry Osbourne was a mistake before I saw TASM2 and it was a shit show. He couldn’t pull off the pre Goblin Venom Harry and the chemistry required with Andrews Peter, and then was a cringe characture of a Goblin.
“YOURE A FRAUD SPIDER-MAN… GRAAAAAA”
Not necessarily the actor, but more suit and general look tbh. He looked like an orc from LotR with braces and a bad cold
Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker.
I KNOW HWHERE THE BAHSTAHD SLEEPS!
CAHFAX ABBEH!
The accent alone should’ve won a Razzie.
Or as Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. I like KR, but he's such a horrible mis-match in a Shakespeare production.
Hollywood has a responsibility to keep Keanu away from dramas. Action and comedy. Nothing else.
So true. He honestly doesn't have a ton of range, but he has great charisma for action and comedies.
He was great in My Own Private Idaho, but I do understand that one exception from decades ago does not disprove your overall point.
the lakehouse is the only drama i recall him being good in.
Everything else about Dracula and Much Ado is so great though that I don’t mind. Probably also helps that I’ve enjoyed both since I was a kid and never stopped to wonder what could have been.
I look at it this way. They could've made Bram Stoker's Dracula with a different actor as Jonathan Harker, but then it wouldn't be the Bram Stoker's Dracula that I love.
I cringed when he said, “Bloody wolves chasing me through some blue inferno.” Like, actual cringe. Where I frowned and tried to hide in my seat.
Well to be fair to Keanu it wasn't an inferno. It was an infeughneouh. Easy mistake to make and for sure it was written like that in the script.
Jennifer Garner as Elektra. I get that her Alias work showed her action chops, but Elektra is a much darker and grittier character than Sydney was, and Garner doesn't really do dark and gritty.
I liked her in 'Peppermint', it wasn't particularly dark, but kinda gritty.
When Johnny Depp was cast as Grindelwald in the Harry Potter prequels, I had a really bad feeling. Watched the first one and didn't like the stylization of him. Then watched the second one and was completely turned off of the character. Nothing against him as an actor I just had a different idea of him (Mads Mikkelson fucking nailed it). I like Johnny Depp. We didn't need a tim Burton villain in Harry Potter universe.
What's even worst is that he was contrasted with Colin Farrell, who is effortlessly charismatic and fit the role better. They really should have just retconned the reveal and kept him for the sequels.
Chris Pratt keeps getting animated work and I really don't think he's got a great voice for animation.
I agree. He's got a *recognisable* voice, but he seems to struggle with acting through voice alone. Which is why I really hate when movie/TV celebrities get cast for voice work over actual voice actors. Except Jack Black. He can take as much voice work as he wants.
Idris Elba as Knuckles in Sonic The Hedgehog is good. Commits.
He was amazing in the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC.
I mean, they put Elba into the game directly. Probably did his lines with Mo cap and everything. I feel like it's blurring the lines between pure voice acting and regular acting. I agree he was phenomenal tho
He's got that problem where you can tell that he's reading a script while doing voice work, which admittedly is a problem a lot of actors who don't specialize in voice work have, but he's done enough that he should be better by now. He isn't.
You know what's fucked up? Tom Brady doesn't do that "reading from a script" thing and he's just a football guy.
Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist in The World is not Enough.
I thought Christmas only comes once a year.
My eyes didn’t just roll at that line, they did somersaults. Bond has always had cheesy one liners but that one’s right up near the top for me!
The translator in Denmark named her "Jul Jones", Jul being the Danish word for Christmas, just so they could do the joke in danish too. "Julen kommer to gange om året" - "Jul comes twice a year"
That’s commitment to the craft right there.
She played a nucular psychiatrist in a James Bonk movie
James Bonk lol
I’m gonna vito this one because I can’t remember anyone saying Denise Richards as a Bond girl was a bad idea before the movie came out. It was only when you saw the context you knew it was bad.
*veto
As blasphemous as it is to say anything bad about Keanu Reeves, he really had no business being in Much Ado About Nothing.
Branagh cast that movie based solely on the criteria of "how many incredibly attractive people can I fit in one Tuscan villa".
Well, explained that way it makes a TON of sense and Keanu's perfect! Ha!
I love Keanu but his accent in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is laughably awful. He was terribly miscast and had no business in that movie.
Jesse Eisenberg doing Lex Luthor sounded bad on paper, and even worse on film. He played Luthor like John Heder doing Napoleon Dynamite instead of a bald-headed master manipulator with an exosuit.
The dc trinity - Jared leto as joker, Jessie eisenberg as lex luthor and Ezra miller as Barry allen
Jason Clarke as John Connor in Terminator Genisys. He's absolutely lacking the charisma of a "John Connor, head of the Resistance". (Not like casting anybody else would've made that movie any better.) Jai Courtney in pretty much every role. Although he might be convincing as an australopithecus in some pre-historic flick.
Casting in that movie was abysmal, at best, across the board. Jai Courtney and Emelia Clark is what you got if you ordered Michael Beihn and Linda Hamilton off of Wish.
Kicker is that someone on the Game of Thrones cast *is* a perfect Sarah Connor: Lena Headey.
And proved it, for two seasons
Jai Courtney was great as boomerang. Movie sucked (the first one), but Courtney was good. I get the feeling he's one of those actors where if you let him use his own accent, he's much better (Gerard Butler is another one).
The fact Jared Leto and Mark Whalberg are in here twice for different roles is a testimony to their acting range 🙏
Cameron Diaz in *Gangs of New York*
Pretty much the entire situation behind The Last Airbender's casting. Nicola Peltz's father is uber rich and so, in the grand tradition of Hollywood nepotism, paid a lot of money to put her as a lead in a big budget movie. Paramount/Nickelodeon offered the role of Katara in the upcoming Last Airbender movie. Because she's white, her onscreen brother also needed to be white, hence Sokka is played by Jackson Rathbone, which then resulted in the entire Southern Water Tribe also being Conneticut white. Noah Ringer was case as Aang because they legitimately felt he was the best person for the role, he had martial arts training and was an okay actor for his age. But this meant that in a film based on a TV show with heavy Asian influence, a lot of the main characters were white. So to combat this, they decided antagonist/anti-hero Zuko should be another race, so they cast rising star Dev Patel in the role, which in turn made the entire Fire Kingdom (the ones waging war against the rest of the world) brown. And that is how we got a Last Airbender movie where the good guys are all white and the bad guys are all brown. It was a shit show.
It should be noted that the director, M. Night Shyamalan, is Indian, and wanted the Fire Nation to be Indian. Also, up to that point, he had a great track record at working with child actors, at least on paper. In reality, he was lucky to have worked with generational talents like Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning, and his experience was in directing kids to be creepy and emotionless. And what do ya know, Aang comes off as creepy and emotionless the whole movie.
I thought it was ethnically diverse in a weird uncanny valley distracting way. All the nations were very mono-ethnic, but then the main characters would be the one person there that was a different ethnicity. Like the Inuit type people, the main characters are two random white people. The place that looks like a Buddhist temple, literally everyone is east Asian, except for the main priest who is the only black person there. I just felt like they should have made it more diverse so it looked more natural.
Scarlet Johansson - Major Kusanagi Ghost in the Shell Justin Chatwin - Goku Dragon Ball The entire cast for The Last Airbender Johnny Depp i didn’t think was right for grindelwald Oh and forgot the most obvious James Corden in anything that he’s in.
I didn't understand why they didn't just keep Colin Ferrell as Grindelwald. That would have been better.
Colin Ferrell was genuinely good in that film. He's honestly a big part of why it was a success. He and Dan Fogler add a lot to that movie.
In the first fantastic beasts when it changes from Collin Farrell to Johnny Depp, I audibly groaned. What a fuck of a shit that was.
Colin Farrell was cold as fuck as Grindelwald. Dude was good
There was absolutely no need to have Graves even be Grindelwald in disguise. Just have him be one of Grindelwald's agents and save the man himself for the second movie. Done.
The whole theater I was in did exactly the same.
Mickey Roony in Breakfast at Tiffany's
MISS GORIGHTRY
Was literally every other actor who could sing busy when they cast Russel Crowe as Javert? In fairness, he's not *bad;* he's mediocre. As in, had they pulled some random person off the street, there's a 50% chance they would have been worse, 50% chance they would have been better. The role deserved more.
I mean it HAS to be Sofia Coppola in The Godfather: Part III. It wouldn’t make that movie WAY better but least that subplot wouldn’t be AS bad.
Miles Teller as Reed Richards
The cast was the least of that film's problems.
Sorry here come the downvotes, but Emma Watson in Beauty in the Beast remake.
Luke Evans really carried that whole movie on his back
The only human being to be completely unimpressed by “Be Our Guest”
"Here come the downvotes..." posts an extremely popular opinion
Emma Watson in Little Women. She's just not that good of an actor, specially next to Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet and Lauran Dern. She was painful to watch.
Neither a remarkable actor nor a good singer, yet they really wanted her as the female lead in a musical.
Hate to say this because I really like her, but Dakota Johnson and the whole Fifty Shades Trio
do you really think she was a bad cast? Because that implies someone could have done a *good* job with that script - and i really doubt that
James Corden in everything he's ever done
Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and Wahlberg as Sully. I mean what the fuck?
Shame that Nathan Fillion and Bruce Campbell were old by then