10 Hollywood vanity projects that failed miserably
As long as there are overpaid celebrities, there will be vanity projects. For actors, this often means writing, starring, possibly directing, and usually financing a film intended to glorify their image. You can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they genuinely believe the project is more than just a self-indulgence, but either way, the outcome is always blatantly self-serving and woefully misjudged.
There are some repeat offenders. Kevin Costner’s first brush with success as a self-financed director with Dances with Wolves has been emboldening him for more than three decades no matter how many financial holes and critical disasters he walks into.
Others learned their lesson. Mariah Carey hasn’t seemed too eager to create another feature film vehicle for herself since the debacle of 2001’s Glitter, even when fans insist that it’s a misunderstood masterpiece (it is not).
Any celebrity worth his or her salt is bound to fall for their mythology at some point, but the ones in this roundup fell for it so hard that they were willing to put their money, time, and often careers on the line for it. From ill-conceived music biopics from actors who can’t sing to ill-conceived romantic comedies from singers who can’t act, here are some of the most shameless Hollywood vanity projects of all time.
10 Hollywood vanity projects that failed miserably:
Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000)
The crossover between Hollywood and the church of Scientology is well-established, but while Tom Cruise keeps his passionate affiliation for the organisation largely to himself, John Travolta decided to spread the gospel in one of the most ill-conceived ways possible. Putting millions of his own dollars behind an adaptation of Scientology founder LR Hubbard’s 1,050-page novel Battlefield Earth proved to be a low point, even for someone with a terrible track record.
Set in the year 3000 AD, when demons rule the earth, the film stars Travolta as a 10-foot-tall alien with flowing grey dreadlocks who laughs in a way that is too unhinged to be either scary or funny. It’s a mess of cardboard set design, confused actors spouting incomprehensible exposition, and a non-existent plot that is somehow overstuffed and desperately boring. Travolta claimed that it would be “like Star Wars but better,” “Pulp Fiction for the year 3000,” and “the Schindler’s List of science fiction.” Instead, it was hailed as the worst movie ever made.
It bombed so hard that its production company, Franchise Pictures, was sued by its own investors and went bankrupt, and many of the people involved with it have disowned it. Screenwriter JD Shapiro has apologised for his contribution and said that comparing the film to a trainwreck would be insulting to trainwrecks. Its producer, Andrew Stevens, said that it was a “shit concept with a shit book and a shit script that should never have been made.” But Travolta is unbothered. “I have no regrets at all,” he claimed in 2014. “And if we had to do it over again, I would still do it. It was a moment where I could say, ‘I had all the power in the world and could do whatever I wanted.’ Not a lot of people get that opportunity, and I did what I wanted to do.” Therein lies the very definition of a vanity project.
Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001)
Known for being Mariah Carey’s number one fan, Mariah Carey had been working on a movie vehicle for herself for years before 2001’s Glitter finally lurched its way onto the big screen. The film follows a young girl who grows up in an orphanage and becomes a backup singer with grand aspirations. Eventually, she meets a DJ who falls in love with her and makes her a star. In other words, it’s basically the plot of A Star is Born, but it’s executed so poorly that the parallels are largely hidden.
The release of the film was plagued with setbacks when Carey began displaying erratic behaviour in public appearances. In one interview, her publicist grabbed the microphone from her during a rambling speech and instructed the photographers to stop filming. Carey was eventually hospitalised, with tabloids running unsubstantiated stories about a rumoured suicide attempt. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The release of Glitter and its soundtrack album were pushed back by three fateful weeks, landing a mere ten days after the 9/11 attacks. Even if the film had been watchable, few Americans had an appetite for a musical with so much glitter that it became the title. The film was such a box office failure that it even put Carey’s music career in jeopardy. Having left Columbia Records in 1999 to pursue a deal with EMI that gave her complete creative control over the Glitter soundtrack, the new label severed ties with the star when the soundtrack album flopped. Compared to the 20 million copies that her 1993 album Music Box had sold, Glitter sold a mere two million.
The Postman (Kevin Costner, 1997)
Riding high on the success of his 1990 Oscar-winning directorial debut, Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner had time and money to burn when it came to conceiving his second feature. Unfortunately, he chose The Postman, a post-apocalyptic western so bad that it nearly ended his career. Set in the near future, when the United States has been turned into a wasteland, it stars the actor as a postman wandering through the desert trying to be a Messiah figure to the downtrodden.
Costner might have been hoping that it would be a cross between George Miller’s Mad Max saga, Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars trilogy, and the New Testament, but his world-building doesn’t hold a candle to Miller’s, and his charisma is decidedly lacking compared to both Clint Eastwood and Jesus.
In an echo of Costner’s future run-ins with directing, the test screenings for the bloated three-hour snore of a Waterworld knockoff struck fear into the hearts of Warner Bros executives, but the star refused to cut a single minute from its runtime. It bombed at the box office, lost the studio tens of millions of dollars, and was panned by critics. Gene Siskel, the reviewer behind the popular show Siskel & Ebert, cheekily dubbed the film Dances with Myself.
Paradise Alley (Sylvester Stallone, 1978)
Sylvester Stallone scored it big when he wrote and starred in a film about a down-on-his-luck boxer who gets a shot at greatness. He was a largely unknown actor when he wrote the script of 1976’s Rocky, and it was a savvy move when he insisted on starring in it, too. The success of the film can hardly be overstated. With a budget of $1million, it made $225m at the box office. It made Stallone something of a unicorn in the industry – a relative unknown who burst onto the scene and was practically printing money.
Unfortunately, when given carte blanche and a pile of cash for his next movie, Stallone tried to capture lightning in a bottle for the second time by writing, directing, and starring in a film about a family of wrestlers. He even sings the theme song, which, although not strictly good is probably his best contribution to the project. The issue wasn’t so much that Stallone was rehashing old territory, it was that the film, by any metric or comparison, just wasn’t good. Critics panned his direction, his writing, and his acting, saying that it was a ham-fisted, semi-coherent, relentlessly emotionally manipulative overindulgence from a filmmaker who needed guardrails.
For his part, Stallone blamed it all on the studio for putting their foot down in the editing room. Speaking to Roger Ebert in 1980, the star said, “I’ll never forgive myself for the way I allowed myself to be manipulated during the editing of that film. There were a lot of scenes in there to give atmosphere and character, and they wanted them out just to speed things along. They removed 40 scenes, altogether.” If you ask anyone who saw the film how it could be improved, it’s unlikely that they’d request, “The same movie but twice as long.”
Under the Cherry Moon (Prince, 1986)
It is reassuring to know that someone as superhumanly skilled as Prince was not, in fact, good at everything. At first glance, 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon was a reasonable gamble. Two years before, the romantic rock musical Purple Rain demonstrated that the musician could carry a whole movie with aplomb, rake in money at the box office, and win an Academy Award for it. Allowing him to go one step further and direct a romantic comedy all on his own didn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Sadly, it was.
Under the Cherry Moon stars Prince and The Time band member Jerome Benton as gigolos living on the French Riviera who con older women. In retrospect, it bears some striking plot similarities with the 1988 Michael Caine, Steve Martin film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but severely lacks its charm. Set in the 1930s and shot in black and white, Under the Cherry Moon was big a departure from Purple Rain, and even a stellar soundtrack couldn’t save it from its own undercooked, often amateurish stabs at auteurism.
Warner Bros. had practically fallen over themselves to give Prince complete creative and financial freedom on the film, and even though he hadn’t initially intended to direct it, he took the helm when he decided the original director, Mary Lambert, wasn’t up to the task. There have been some attempts to reframe this film as a cult classic in the years after Prince’s death, but it’s missing several layers of shambolic intrigue for those efforts to be taken seriously. The one bright spot? It marks Kristin Scott Thomas’s feature debut.
Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey, 2004)
Before Kevin Spacey left Hollywood in disgrace over sexual assault allegations, he did something else that was completely reprehensible: a biopic of 1950s crooner Bobby Darin called Beyond the Sea. Spacey took it upon himself to not only co-write, co-produce, star in, and direct the film but to use his own singing voice. This might not have been an issue if Darin was renowned for being a mediocre singer, but his fame hinged on his incredibly smooth voice and wide vocal range, and this film proves (if anyone but Spacey had doubts) that acting range and vocal range are not the same thing.
Spacey is adept at creating complex characters, but when playing a well-known public figure, it’s hard to see him as anything other than Kevin Spacey pretending to be a famous singer. This issue was compounded by the fact that the actor was 45 when the film was made, even though Darin died at 37, and the film follows his life from two decades before.
2004 was a time when Hollywood still fawned over period biopics by default, and even though it bombed at the box office, Beyond the Sea managed to snag a few decent reviews. And yet, it has aged poorly. Though Spacey’s genuine passion for the film cannot be questioned (he put some of his own money into the budget and didn’t take payment for any of his work), it now looks like nothing more than a glitzy, overly expensive indulgence from an actor whose self-confidence needed reigning in.
The Alamo (John Wayne, 1960)
John Wayne forged one of the most successful personas of any actor in Hollywood history, and at a certain point, all that gun-toting, cowboy-hatted self-mythologising got the better of him. The actor had been trying to get a film made about the legendary 1836 Battle of the Alamo since 1945 but had clashed with Republic Pictures over their proposed budget. Instead of questioning whether he really did need an astronomical amount of money to make a standard western, he started his own production company. He was so insistent that the film be exactly as he envisioned it that he even decided to direct and produce it himself, never mind the fact that he had no experience. Wayne eventually stepped in to star in the movie as well, just for good measure.
There were issues with the production right away, with unhappy actors and doubts as to whether Wayne was up to the task of directing. When his frequent collaborator John Ford visited the set, he was rumoured to be so appalled with the situation that he took over directing for the day.
The result is a nearly three-hour slog of ahistorical propaganda. At the time, Wayne may not have known just how inaccurate the mythology surrounding the Alamo actually was, but even by those standards, he was shamelessly peddling a version of history that was problematic at best.
This is Me… Now: A Love Story (Dave Meyers, 2024)
No one was asking Jennifer Lopez who she was… then because the singer has been keeping herself a prominent subject of tabloids for decades. Her attunement to the spotlight is unparalleled, and her talent for being famous has long obscured her talent as a musician. When she started teasing her first album in a decade, it was clear that she had more in mind than a few well-timed singles and a world tour. Instead, she released a self-funded multimedia project that cost $20m and involved an album, a documentary entitled The Greatest Love Story Never Told (again, an inaccurate title given the press rollout of her reconciliation and marriage to Ben Affleck after 20 years), and a film.
This is Me… Now is bursting with ambition and so lacking in coherence that it’s not entirely clear whether it’s meant to be a feature film or an hour-long music video. J Lo can at least be commended for not half-assing it – the project is full of some truly bizarre creative choices, unrestrained opulence, and a focus on herself so intense it’s almost avant-garde. She has a metaphorical metal heart that runs on rose petals. There is a Zodiac council comprised of, among other celebrities, Jane Fonda and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Ben Affleck appears.
Of all the vanity projects, this is the most shameless and the most watchable—it’s only 65 minutes, after all. Academics who focus on celebrities will study it for years and possibly centuries. It is a treasure trove of intentional and inadvertent revelations, a true gem of the vanity project genre.
Inchon (Terence Young, 1981)
Vanity projects come in many shapes and sizes, and it just so happens that one of the most blatant came from the ultra-rightwing founder of the Christian Unification movement, Sun Myung Moon. Widely condemned for creating a cult-like organisation in which he was viewed as a Messiah, Moon was adept at using popular media to send a conservative message to the masses. He started the right-wing newspaper The Washington Times and created a production company, planning to make a film about Jesus or, if that didn’t work out, Elvis.
Moon decided to press ahead with a film about the Battle of Inchon when a psychic reportedly conversed with General Douglas MacArthur from beyond the grave and gained his permission to begin the project. The cult leader was not messing around. He wanted top talent, and that is what he got. Pumping $46m of his own money and funds from the Unification Church into the project, he managed to hire Terence Young, who had directed three Bond movies, and Sir Laurence Olivier to play MacArthur.
The production was plagued with catastrophes. There was a typhoon that destroyed the set. One of the actors died and had to be removed from the film during editing. Olivier was bedridden with arthritis (and probably regret). Somehow, the release of the film was more disastrous. It was so ridiculed by critics and cinema-goers that the distributors pulled it from theatres and declined to release it on video. Critics found it unintentionally hilarious, utterly tedious, and potentially the worst movie ever made.
The Love Guru (Marco Schnabel, 2008)
There are many comedians who have been laid low by their own hubris. When kept on a tight leash of good direction and jokes tested on real people rather than yes men, a self-indulgent comedian can look like a genius. But when given free rein, he or she can become either career-endingly offensive or career-endingly unfunny. Mike Myers did not lose his career over The Love Guru, but it slowed his momentum and arguably should have brought it to a complete halt.
The idea of making a movie about a guru had been knocking around in his head since the ‘90s, which is exactly where it should have stayed. Unfortunately, he was enjoying the successes of Shrek and his James Bond spoof series, Austin Powers, and it gave him the opportunity to write and star in an entire feature to the tune of $62m.
The Love Guru is a culturally insensitive, leering ten-second joke stretched into a 90-minute movie. Myers plays the titular “guru,” an American raised in a Hindu ashram who decides to become a spiritual leader to give himself a competitive edge with women. It makes Austin Powers look like an Oscar-worthy biopic of a courtly statesman and Myers like an overindulged, overgrown 15-year-old boy who is supremely confident that everyone shares his juvenile sense of humour. The dismal box office indicated otherwise. Critics panned it, and the planned sequels were scrapped. Somehow, Myers’ career was not.
