Movie Flops That Totally Devastated Actors

Any actor who's in a lot of movies is inevitably going to be in some movies that lose money. Generally, this isn't too hard to deal with — actors are already paid for their work before a film is released, and while a string of flops can do damage to a career, one-off disappointments are rarely catastrophic. As such, actors usually have one of two responses when audiences and or critics reject one of their movies: they'll either politely disagree and defend a film they think is good, or they'll agree that the movie had problems anyway and treat it as a learning experience for the next one.

Sometimes, however, stars will get really defensive of a bomb they liked or get really down about one they disliked. Even if it's only temporary, dealing with overwhelmingly negative press for a flop can take its toll on an actor, especially if said actor had some additional creative involvement in the project as a writer, producer, or director. This list features both those actors who found themselves intensely defending a flop and those who hated every aspect of being involved.

Compared to other films on this list, "Black Adam" wasn't the biggest disaster at the box office, making $393 million worldwide as the 15th highest-grossing movie of 2022. Factoring in a budget that ballooned up to $260 million before marketing costs, however, the film was still far from a hit (a movie's box office needs to at least double its budget to break even). For Johnson, a star who's described himself as "franchise viagra" in the past, his big DC superhero movie not "shifting the hierarchy of power" in the direction he hoped it would seems to have been hard to process — so he's been trying to pretend the movie was more successful than it was.

In some truly messy press drama, Johnson's team reported leaked misleading financials to the Hollywood trade paper, Deadline, that claimed "Black Adam" would ultimately turn a profit of $52-72 million after taking into account VOD, streaming, and physical media sales. This contradicted previous reports the film was expected to lose Warner Bros. $50-100 million. A response from the news site, Puck, claims that the Deadline report both underestimated the film's marketing budget and overestimated its likely revenues.

Here's another entry for an actor-writer, and one that proved so upsetting it actually killed their writing career. Before he became a household name, Jack Black was half of the comedy-rock band Tenacious D alongside Kyle Gass. "The D" had an HBO series in the late '90s, and thanks in part to Black's breakout performance in "High Fidelity," the band got a record contract and released their self-titled first album in 2001. In 2006, their long-in-the-works movie, "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny," finally hit theaters — but nobody saw it.

Directed by Liam Lynch and co-written by Lynch, Black, and Gass, this fantasy origin story about the band's formation and quest to claim Satan's guitar pick got mixed reviews from critics, who questioned whether the band's stoner schtick that worked great in episodic format successfully sustained a full feature. Black described the film's box office failure as "a body blow" to Maxim Magazine (via Newshub) and quit screenwriting as a result.

Tenacious D's next album, 2012's "Rize of the Fenix," opened with the lines, "When 'The Pick of Destiny' was released, it was a bomb," and joked about the experience with a fictional story of the group breaking up and needing to reunite as a result of that failure. Though he was heartbroken by this financial failure, Black has been heartened by the fact his fans still enjoy the movie years later.

Faye Dunaway's campily over-the-top performance as the movie star and abusive mother Joan Crawford in the 1981 drama, "Mommie Dearest," was instantly divisive: she was runner-up for best actress at the National Society of Film Critics Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and also won worst actress at the Razzies and the Stinkers Bad Movies Awards. Though the movie has gone on to be embraced as a "so bad, it's good" cult film, the movie disappointed at the box office and had a negative effect on Dunaway's career.

The actress has mostly avoided talking about her experience with "Mommie Dearest," but in a 2016 interview with People, she explained that in the aftermath of the film's release, "people would irretrievably have the wrong impression of me." She considers the movie a bad decision, but one she can't take back, saying, "It's unfortunate they felt they had to make that kind of movie. But you can't be ashamed of the work you've done. You make a decision, and then you have to live with the consequence."

Even Clooney's hatred of "Batman & Robin," however, might not compare to the sheer loathing Bob Hoskins felt towards the 1993 "Super Mario Bros." movie. Long before Chris Pratt voiced an animated Mario in 2023's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," Hoskins wore the red plumber's uniform in a bizarre live-action adaptation that seemingly took more inspiration from "Blade Runner" than from the whimsical Nintendo games.

Hoskins didn't even know the movie was based on a video game when he started working on it; when his kids told him, he responded, "I used to play King Lear." The production was a mess, going over schedule and over budget with the script constantly changing. Hoskins and his co-star, John Leguizamo, were drinking a lot on the set, and one stunt broke Hoskins' finger. All this suffering for a movie that was universally hated by critics and Mario fans alike. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Hoskins called "Super Mario Bros." his worst job, biggest disappointment, and the one thing he wished he could erase from his past.

Neil Marshall's 2019 reboot of "Hellboy," starring David Harbour as the titular red demon, was greeted with skepticism from the moment it was announced. Many fans were disappointed that Guillermo Del Toro never got the chance to make a third "Hellboy" film with Ron Perlman, and Harbour believes that this disappointment colored the reactions to the reboot, leading critics and fans to judge it unfairly.

Speaking with Digital Spy shortly after the film's release, Harbour admitted that the film had "major problems" but that it was still "unfairly bludgeoned" based on audiences' expectations. In 2022, he opened up to GQ about having a hard time personally following the film's failure, and even called Ryan Reynolds, who had his own widely hated superhero flop with "Green Lantern," for support. Harbour succinctly put the ultimate lesson he learned from his "Hellboy" experience this way: "DON'T F**K WITH ESTABLISHED IP."

Unlike the other examples on this list, Jennifer Lawrence was not personally bothered by the fact her 2017 psychological horror movie, "mother!," bombed. The ultraviolent religious allegory was always going to confuse some viewers and offend others, so it's not a shocker that critics were divided on the film and mainstream audiences rejected it. In a Variety "Actors on Actors" video discussion with Adam Sandler, Lawrence said she typically doesn't read reviews or think about her films after she's done promoting them.

So why is Lawrence on this list? Because, as revealed in the Variety video, the film's writer-director and her then-boyfriend, Darren Aronofsky, was devastated by the response to the film, and Lawrence got sick of hearing him constantly talking about the film's reviews: "I was doing double duty of trying to be a supportive partner while also being like, 'Can I please, for the love of God, not think about 'mother!" for one second?'" Lawrence describes the dynamic as "not healthy" for either of them, and she broke up with Aronofsky in the months after the film's release.