The $200m “disappointment” Alexander Skarsgård will never regret: “It didn’t turn me off”
Being related to a famous actor can go one of two ways: you either ride your family’s success to the very top, or you prove once and for all why ‘nepo babies’ deserve to be mocked mercilessly. For Alexander Skarsgård, his career has been more of the former.
The Swedish hunk, and son of the legendary Stellan Skarsgård, has more than stepped out of his father’s shadow to prove himself a talented, successful, beloved performer with more muscles than an entire seafood restaurant.
The Skarsgård dynasty has an uncanny ability to walk the line between financial success and critical acclaim. Stellan has blown reviewers away through his work with Lars von Trier, but has also raked in the moolah with appearances in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Bill Skarsgård’s otherworldly performances as Pennywise and Count Orlok have landed him praise from all sides, but for Alexander, his forays into the mainstream haven’t always gone so well.
In 2012, his name was on the poster for one of the most baffling films ever made. Director Peter Berg presented Battleship, a game loosely based (and I mean loosely) on Hasbro’s board game of the same name. The movie was considered a failure on all fronts, but as Skarsgård explained to The Guardian, he wasn’t in it long enough for that to worry him.
“I get blown up pretty early on,” he quipped, “I’m a fan of Pete Berg. I still think he’s a fantastic director and I actually had a lot of fun. I know it was a disappointment at the box office but it didn’t turn me off big movies.”
To call Battleship a “disappointment at the box office” is like calling the Atlantic Ocean “a big puddle”. The film grossed a healthy $303million, but a difficult pre-production saw its budget spiral wildly out of control. At one point, Universal considered cancelling the project entirely, which would have cost them $30m, but in hindsight, it’s a number they should have taken every day of the week.
When all was said and done, Battleship lost the studio between $150m and $200m, and sure, it didn’t help that it was up against the first Avengers movie in the US, but it also didn’t help that the film was absolute tripe.
James Cameron once said that Battleship degraded the entire medium of cinema, and he wasn’t wrong, for it is a complete disaster; a mind-numbing mess of explosions, exposition-heavy dialogue, corny CGI, and, for some reason, Rihanna. It was absolutely torn to pieces by the critics and rightly so. It turns out that basing a movie on a children’s board game about guessing squares that has zero semblance of plot wasn’t a good idea. Who could have possibly seen that coming?
It might have been one of the worst things to ever happen, but as Skarsgård said, it didn’t put him off making blockbusters. In the years since, he’s appeared in a few major movies, although none of them have really set the world on fire. In my humble opinion, his arthouse work has been much more effective. Although weirdly, I don’t think he’s going to listen to the opinions of some random guy on the internet, so keep on keeping on, sir.
