Hit Movies That Stars Thought Would Fail

Do you ever watch the trailers for movies like "Geostorm" or "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" and wonder how any of the actors involved believed the movie was going to be a success? Don't be too tough on them — figuring out whether a movie's going to be any good just by looking at the script is harder than it looks.

We give our favorite stars a lot of credit for picking the right projects, and while they definitely deserve it, the truth is that a lot of an actor's long-term success boils down to dumb luck, and in some cases, that luck is dumber than others. For every thespian who wisely avoided a clunker after looking at the script, there's another who read through a future classic, assumed it would stink, and gave it thumbs down...or, for one reason or another, ended up taking the gig anyway. With that in mind, let's take a look at some actors who starred in critically and commercially successful movies they initially believed would fail.

Bill Murray voicing the titular character in 2004's "Garfield: The Movie" felt like a full-circle moment. Garfield's voice between 1982 and 2001 was an actor named Lorenzo Music — who also played Peter Venkman in the cartoon "The Real Ghostbusters." Music died in 2001 and therefore couldn't voice the live-action Garfield, so who better to step in than the live-action Peter Venkman?

But nostalgia wasn't the only reason Murray signed on to voice the lasagna-loving feline. When he saw that the movie was co-written by Joel Cohen, he jumped at the chance to be able to work on a Coen brothers movie. As Murray was recording his lines, he was shocked at how bad he thought they were, but he stuck with it and tried to make the best of it. When things didn't improve, he asked to watch back the scenes that had already been cut together — and remarked out loud (via GQ), "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the f— was Coen thinking?" That's when someone informed him that it wasn't Joel Coen, but Joel Cohen, with an H. At that point he was too far in it to back out, so he finished the job on what ended up being a $200 million+ box office hit.

"Friday the 13th" bad guy Jason Voorhees has become an icon of the horror genre, anchoring the long-running franchise and appearing in everything from comics to a Mortal Kombat game. But he wasn't the bad guy in the first "Friday" — the killer in that movie was Jason's mother, Pamela Voorhees, who was played by the late Betsy Palmer.

Palmer once admitted that the only reason she appeared in the film was because she wanted a new car, specifically a Scirocco. As soon as she found out it was a horror movie, Palmer assumed "Friday the 13th" would come and go without much fanfare, its only lasting reminder being the car she bought with the money, and she was similarly dismissive of the script, calling it a "piece of s—" and joking that her first response upon reading it was to wonder aloud who'd ever go see it.

To be clear, Edie Falco didn't think "Avatar: The Way of Water" was going to fail. She thought it had already failed. As we all know, each "Avatar" movie so far has taken approximately 50 years to make, and so the amount of time that passes between when the actors filmed their parts and when the movie actually comes out is significant. So significant, in fact, that Falco thought the second "Avatar" movie — in which she plays General Frances Ardmore — had already come out and had flopped at the box office.

During a 2023 appearance on "The View," Falco explained that she filmed her scenes for "Avatar 2" four years earlier. She didn't really follow updates on it, and eventually just assumed that it had released at some point and was such a huge dud that everyone immediately forgot about it and moved on. Falco then confessed, "Someone recently said, 'Avatar is coming out,' and I said, 'Oh, it hasn't come out yet?'" Given the 13-year gap between the first two movies, it's hard to blame Falco for the assumption — and at least she's able to poke fun at the whole thing, joking that she'll probably never get cast in anything ever again over the whole gaffe.

It has since been reappraised in a less positive light by a lot of people — and shows up on lists of undeserved Best Picture winners — but "Forrest Gump" was a crowd-pleasing hit upon release. Star Tom Hanks even saw fit to come out and defend the movie against its detractors, saying that it's only because the movie was such a big hit that people have seen fit to come at it, and they wouldn't be so hard on it if it didn't make as much money as it did.

It's interesting to hear Hanks going to bat for "Forrest Gump" now, considering he had moments where he wasn't especially confident in the movie while actually filming it. During the 2023 New Yorker Live event, Hanks reflected on making "Forrest Gump" and admitted that he questioned director Robert Zemeckis on if anyone was going to care about the movie or its lead character. Hanks said (via People) that he asked Zemeckis, "This guy sitting on a thing in these goofy shoes and this cuckoo suit with a suitcase full of 'Curious George' books and stuff like that. Are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody?" He says Zemeckis did little to reassure him, claiming the director responded with "We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction." It all worked out fine — including Best Actor and Best Director Oscar wins for the duo.

One of the most recent Christmas movies to be added to the pantheon of holiday classics that people add to their annual watchlist is 2003's "Elf." Directed by Jon Favreau before he helped to invent the Marvel Cinematic Universe or co-create acclaimed "Star Wars" TV shows, the movie starred Will Ferrell as a human named Buddy who accidentally ends up at the North Pole to be raised by Santa's elves as one of their own.

Being in production at a time when Ferrell was only just starting to be a presence in movies and was still largely known for "Saturday Night Live" put the actor in a tricky spot. While filming the outdoor scenes in New York City, the cameras were hidden so that Ferrell could get a real reaction out of real people. Unfortunately, some of those people recognized him — and as a result, they expressed concern over why he was walking around in an elf costume and asked if he was doing okay. It made him question whether the movie was actually going to work, or if it was going to effectively end his movie career just as it was beginning. Obviously, it did work, and "Elf" was both a hit in its day as well as an enduring classic of the holiday season — and Ferrell's filmography only grew from there.

According to Hollywood lore, during the production of "Animal House," an executive from Universal approached director John Landis with a simple ultimatum: find a big-name star they could put on the poster, or the studio would pull the plug. Luckily for Landis, he just so happened to be good friends with Donald Sutherland, who said that he'd happily appear in the movie — for $250,000. Universal execs told Landis to "get the f— outta here" upon hearing that, so Landis made a counteroffer: $25,000 for a single day's work, and two percent of the film's gross.

Sutherland, in a move he has since admitted he regrets immensely, told Landis "I just want the money" because he didn't think the movie would succeed. A revised offer of $35,000 was drawn up by Universal, including Sutherland's daily fee of $25,000 plus a little extra in case filming ran over. By his own estimation, turning down that initial offer cost Sutherland $14 million for a single day's work.

"Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" was a movie almost nobody expected to succeed. It was a PG-13 Disney pirate adventure based on a theme park ride, just for starters; as others have noted, nothing about it should have worked. Even Michael Eisner tried to shut production down when he found out it was going to cost Disney over $100 million, and only director Gore Verbinski's passion for the project — and some judicious rewrites — changed his mind.

Eisner wasn't alone in his misgivings. During a pretty frank interview with The Guardian in 2008, Keira Knightley confessed that most of the principal cast were embarrassed to be working on the movie — and she in particular thought it was "going to be total s—." Knightley never told any of her friends she was working on it, which must have made for some fun conversations after it turned out to be a massive worldwide hit that spawned a blockbuster franchise.

To find out that someone in the cast of "Home Alone" was skeptical of its potential to be a hit — or even a decent movie at all — it's easy to assume that the person in question was Joe Pesci. And while there has been anecdotal evidence to suggest that to be the case, it's actually someone else who has been more officially confirmed to have been a non-believer in the eventual holiday classic. So much so that this person had to apologize for it while making the sequel.

While appearing on the podcast Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin, director Chris Columbus explains that John Heard — who played patriarch Peter McCallister — "thought he was making the biggest piece of s*** in the world" while working on "Home Alone." Columbus said that Heard had a bit of an attitude and was difficult during filming, as a result of thinking he was stuck making a bad movie. But Heard obviously fell in love with the final product as much as audiences did, and was a big enough person to admit the error of his ways. While making "Home Alone 2," Columbus claims that Heard broke character in the middle of shooting a scene to say, "I just would like to say to Chris and the crew, I owe you a big apology. We made a great movie the first time and I'm here to support you." Heard died in 2017 at age 71.

Australian actor Geoffrey Rush knows his way around an Oscar-caliber performance — he's delivered four so far, including in "Shine," "Shakespeare in Love," "Quills," and "The King's Speech," winning for "Shine." But that doesn't mean he always knows going into a project that it's going to be acclaimed, let alone if anyone is even going to be bothered to see the movie at all. And he admitted that he doubted both of those things when it came to "The King's Speech."

In an interview with News.com.au (via Digital Spy), Rush reminisces on when he first received the script for the historical drama about King George VI's struggles with stuttering. "When we sat and read the initial script [...] the first thing I read was, 'Well no one will want to go and see this,' let alone, 'Oh this is an Oscar-worthy film.'" With that in mind, he found it funny when people subsequently accused the movie of being Oscar bait, as that was the last thing he thought about the movie at first glance. But whether or not it was intended to be Oscar bait, it hooked an impressive 12 nominations and won four, including best picture. As for Rush's assumption that nobody would see it — "The King's Speech" was also a surprisingly massive box office hit for a movie of its kind, netting over $400 million at the worldwide box office.

With near-universal critical acclaim and hundreds of millions of dollars made at the box office, "It" ranks among the most critically and commercially successful horror movies ever made. This is something that came as a huge relief to actor Bill Skarsgård, who was absolutely convinced something would go wrong during production.

Skarsgård, who portrayed Pennywise the clown in the movie, explained to Variety that he spent the entire production worrying that "things were going too well," noting that even when the film was projected to wildly surpass the studio's most conservative estimates of success based on early reviews, he still somehow managed to convince himself something terrible would happen to undo it all. It didn't, and now all that's left is for the world to decide whether he's a scary-looking hot guy, a hot-looking scary guy, or something in between.

Even though director Michael Bay was still in the middle of establishing himself as the maker of ridiculously successful films when "Armageddon" was released in 1998, there was still little reason to doubt that his latest film was going to be a big hit. Ben Affleck, who played driller-turned-astronaut A.J. Frost, didn't necessarily question whether "Armageddon" would fail at the box office. Rather, the actor wondered if the movie wasn't on the road to failing creatively.

Every few years, the commentary track that Affleck recorded for the "Armageddon" DVD seems to go viral again for one reason or another. The snippet everyone zeroes in on is when Affleck explains how he realized during filming how deeply flawed the premise of the movie was. He says he began to grill Bay about it, pointing out that it would've been easier to teach astronauts how to drill than teach drillers how to be astronauts. Affleck then does a hilarious impression of Bay, and imitates him telling Affleck to "shut the f— up" and "just shut your mouth" in response to his criticisms of the story. He then continues to chuckle his way through completely picking apart the silly foundation the movie is built upon for several more minutes. But audiences apparently don't need their space-rock disaster movies to hold up to plot scrutiny, as "Armageddon" was second only to "Titanic" in topping 1998's year-end box office.

James Marsden has had an interesting and varied career, one that includes comedies, dramas, video game adaptations, musicals, biopics, both Marvel and DC movies, and more. He's also done his fair share of romance films, including one that is iconic among fans of the genre — "The Notebook," the 2004 Nicolas Sparks adaptation that stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in the lead roles.

In the movie, Marsden played Lon Hammond, the guy who McAdams's character ends up with after she thinks Gosling's Noah has stopped writing to her — and later cheats on with Noah when they reconnect. It's all pretty standard Nicolas Sparks fare, which is exactly what Marsden worried about while he was making the movie. In an interview with Out magazine looking back at his career, he discusses "some movies that [he has] been in that [he] was sure people would laugh at, that have become huge," and pointed to "The Notebook" as one example of that. He elaborated, "I thought 'The Notebook' was going to be a schmaltzy Movie of the Week-type thing, and here we are!" Whether he was right or wrong on that second point is a matter of opinion, but the raw data speaks for itself — it grossed over $100 million at the box office and remains the best-reviewed Nicolas Sparks adaptation to date.

Certainly nobody could have predicted back in 1939 that "Gone with the Wind" was going to be discussed and held aloft as an all-time classic film nearly a century later. But the people making it must have at least known they were making a good movie. Well, certainly some of the cast and crew did — but that list doesn't include Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O'Hara in the historical romance epic.

In letters discovered by The Hollywood Reporter between Leigh and second husband Laurence Olivier, neither actor had high hopes for "Gone with the Wind" — and Olivier even worried about the damage it was going to do to Leigh's still-rising career. Olivier writes to Leigh, "You have got to justify yourself in the next two or three films (or even two or three years) by proving that the presumable failure of ['Gone with the Wind'] was not your fault and you can only do that by being really good in the following parts." Before the movie was even out, they were already planning Leigh's career comeback after how badly they thought "Gone with the Wind" was going to tarnish it. She'd win her first of two Oscars for her work in the film, which would be the highest-grossing movie of all time worldwide by a fairly wide margin if box office tallies were adjusted for inflation.