The bad joke that saved George Clooney from the worst movie of 1999: “It’s not funny”
Most actors can survive starring in one of the worst movies ever made, but can they do it twice? It was a situation that George Clooney found himself staring straight in the face in the late 1990s, and if he hadn’t made the right one, it’s enough to make you wonder if his career would ever recover.
After all, Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin was a steaming pile of shite. Clooney understandably thought that playing one of the most iconic characters in pop culture was exactly what he needed to shake the TV stigma and establish himself as a big-screen leading man, but it didn’t go to plan.
Savaged by critics, lambasted by fans, the 11-time Razzie nominee was a disaster on every level. It didn’t take long for Clooney to show that he had the chops to succeed as a top-level star, with Steven Soderbergh’s smouldering Out of Sight releasing the next year, but he almost walked straight into another shitshow.
In early 1997, months before Batman & Robin was declared dead on arrival, Clooney was circling his next role in a high-profile Hollywood production. It would have paired him up with the fastest-rising leading man in modern cinema, which sounded like a bulletproof recipe, apart from the fact that the production was Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West.
Will Smith, who’d turned down The Matrix to take top billing in what was the most expensive movie ever made at the time, has frequently called it the worst thing he’s ever been in, and he might be right, depending on how you feel about M Night Shyamalan’s After Earth.
It was a blow to the former Fresh Prince’s confidence, but as an established, Academy Award-winning character actor, Kevin Kline managed to emerge relatively unscathed from the wreckage. Would that have been the case had Clooney played Artemus Gordon opposite Smith’s Jim West? It’s highly debatable.
In his memoirs, Sonnenfeld revealed that he spent a weekend with Clooney to talk shop in the summer of ’97, only for a restaurant they were dining in to drop a clanger. “The staff was so aflutter they created a special dessert: sugar cookies in the shape of bats, in homage to George’s recently released Batman & Robin.” When he saw the tasty treats resembling his starring vehicle that had been dragged over hot coals, he had a simple question: “Is this some kind of joke?”
It wasn’t, and it was done in earnest, but he was pissed nonetheless. The staff tried to apologise, but Clooney cut them off with a curt, “Well, it’s not funny.” It was an ominous sign, and with one awful blockbuster freshly added to his CV, the ER heartthrob suddenly became a lot less interested in adding another potential disaster to the pile, with a script rewrite the final straw.
“He didn’t like the new draft,” Sonnenfeld reflected. “Will had more funny lines than George. He was bailing.” In hindsight, it was the smartest decision he could have made, with Wild Wild West flopping at the box office, winning five Razzies, including ‘Worst Picture’, and haunting Smith for years to come.
