Hyped Hollywood careers that crashed and burned
It’s tough to maintain a successful career in Hollywood. One wrong role, or bad review, can change your life. Sometimes, extra pressure is put onto artists by forces out of their control - with the Hollywood hype machine destroying careers as frequently as it creates them.
Here’s a list of some of our favourite actors and filmmakers who couldn’t live up to the marketing / media hype that wasn’t actually their fault.
M Night Shyamalan
Labelled ‘the next Spielberg’ by Newsweek after the superb triple-bill of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, Shyamalan collapsed under the weight of the hype. The Village was his first wobble, but the wheels completely came off with Lady in the Water. Next came The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth. Has any director has a worse run?
Shyamalan has fared better since, partly thanks to a return to his low-budget / high-concept origins. But still, we’re pretty sure no-one’s going to compare him to the most successful director of all time again.
Read more: Hugh Jackman reveals he was almost fired from playing Wolverine
Edward Burns
When Ed Burns won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, it was the start of an awards sweep for his debut feature, The Brothers McMullen. As writer, director, producer and star, Burns was hyped as the most exciting new voice on the independent scene.
His follow-up, She’s The One, wasn’t as successful - though it is fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with people prepared to give Burns the benefit of the doubt.
However, his third film, No Looking Back, took less than $250,000 domestically from its $5 million budget, and Burns was forced to go low-budget again for his next feature, which he shot in New York.
Still, Burns has a solid career, constantly working, so ‘crashed and burned’ is probably a touch unfair, but to go from being an acclaimed Sundance winner, to directing a Cameron Diaz movie, to shooting a micro-budget feature almost 20 years later (in 2004, Looking for Kitty, which Burns also wrote, directed and starred in, was shot on a hand-held $3,000 digital Panasonic AG-DVX100 camera with a Mini35 adapter), it’s not exactly the heights of commercial success.
Still, we’re sure he’s creatively happy - which is all that matters!
Elizabeth Berkley
When Saved By The Bell actress Elizabeth Berkley was cast as the lead in Paul Verhoeven’s Las Vegas epic Showgirls, she was hyped as the next big thing (with Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct blow-up being used as a comparative example). That’s because no-one had seen it yet.
It’s since been reclaimed as a trash masterpiece but, on release, it was considered to basically be the worst film ever made. Berkley - through no fault of her own - was especially targeted by media outlets who were clearly embarrassed by hyping her in the first place. She’s kept working, but you can’t help but wonder what her career would have looked like without Showgirls.
Lindsay Lohan
Oh, Lindsay. After Mean Girls, it felt like Lindsay Lohan couldn’t put a foot wrong. The teen mag cover star seemed ubiquitous in 2004, until she started making headlines for the wrong reasons.
A sad period of substance abuse hampered Lohan’s career, forcing the star to move to Dubai to get away from the tabloid press (it’s illegal to invade people’s privacy via photography there).
We’re still hoping she finds a role that’ll take her back to the heights of the early 2000s, but going by her most recent film Among the Shadows (2.1 on IMDB), it might not happen any time soon.
Hayden Christensen
There aren’t many movies that are as hyped as Star Wars, and there aren’t many characters as iconic as Darth Vader. So when Hayden Christensen was announced as the lead of Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones, as Anakin Skywalker, he basically became an instant household name (especially in households with Chewbacca wallpaper).
But Christensen’s fame was fleeting, with a negative backlash to his performance combined with some badly chosen roles (Shattered Glass is the exception), such as Jumper, and Awake (for which he was nominated for a Razzie) meaning that he never lived up to the potential of that initial wide exposure.
However, with people recently revisiting and reappraising the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Christensen has found a new acceptance amongst fans. Here’s hoping he gets a cameo in The Rise Of Skywalker.
Taylor Lautner
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have both parlayed their Twilight success into a series of intelligent and interesting indie movies that have transformed them from chat show punchline into well-respected thespians.
They’re the best examples of how to turn hype into something more substantial. At the opposite end of the scale sits Taylor Lautner, the final member of the Twilight lead trio, who made some pretty terrible choices outside of the franchise.
Valentine's Day, Abduction, Grown Ups 2, Tracers, The Ridiculous 6, and Run The Tide. That’s the entirety of Lautner’s non-Twilight career, six movies, and three of them are atrocious (though, to be fair, we haven’t seen - or really heard of - the other three). Lautner appears to have retired from acting, with his last roles coming in 2016.
Sam Worthington
It’s a bit difficult to say someone ‘crashed and burned’ when they’re the lead of a film that’s been at the top of the box office charts for a decade, but after 2009 (in which Worthington also appeared in Terminator: Salvation, at James Cameron’s suggestion - someone who knows something about hype), Worthington’s career took a bizarre nosedive faster than Jake Sully on one of those weird dragon things in the hugely successful Avatar.
Worthington’s biggest role outside of those two 2009 films has been Perseus in Clash Of The Titans and Wrath Of The Titans and, really, that’s it outside of a whole bunch of middling indies / low-budget studio pictures. Basically, when you’re considered the poor man’s Jai Courtney, that’s not great.
