The Brad Pitt movies so bad his entire family hated them: “Dog shit, wasn’t it?”
The more famous and successful an actor becomes, the more likely they are to become surrounded by sycophants and yes men who’ll happily tell them the sun shines out of their arse. Luckily, Brad Pitt had his family around to keep him on an even keel and call him out for making an awful movie.
Among Hollywood’s resident A-listers, Pitt has better instincts than most. It’s been a long time since he’s starred in anything that’s actively terrible, and while there have been a few middling entries in his filmography in between, you’d arguably have to go back to Angelina Jolie’s navel-gazing By the Sea for his last onscreen atrocity.
Not that David Michôd’s War Machine, Jon Watts’ Wolfs, or Robert Zemeckis’ Allied are masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re solid-if-unspectacular, as opposed to outright awful. If you agree with Margot Robbie, then Babylon is on course to be remembered as a classic, but if you don’t, then that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.
Naturally, things weren’t the same back in the early 1990s, when Pitt was trying to prove himself as anything other than a pretty face and chiselled abs. He sought to stretch himself, but Johnny Suede, following up his eye-catching outing in Thelma & Louise, wasn’t ideal.
It would be easy to say that it wasn’t his fault, apart from the fact that writer and director Tom DiCillo pretty much blamed him for the picture’s failure after realising, to his horror, that Pitt was playing the title character in the complete opposite way to how he’d envisioned.
To make matters worse, he followed it up with Ralph Bakshi’s bizarre (and shite) Cool World. Pitched as Who Framed Roger Rabbit with harder and more seductive edges, it splattered on impact at the box office and became the worst-reviewed movie of its leading man’s entire career, an unwanted record it still holds more than 30 years later.
“I liked it,” Pitt told Empire of Johnny Suede in 1994. “But my folks hated it. I always know.” That’s one picture that his parents couldn’t stand, but surely his grandparents would be more forgiving? Shortly after Cool World‘s release, he called them up, and they weren’t in the mood for sugar-coating their opinion.
“We just saw that movie of yours,” his grandfather told him. “Yeah? What movie was that?” he inquired. Gramps couldn’t remember, so he asked his wife. “Betty? What was the name of that movie we didn’t like?” As it turned out, that film was indeed Cool World, but at least Pitt wholeheartedly agreed with them.
“They all hated that one,” he acknowledged, not that he passionately rushed to its defence or anything. “Dog shit, wasn’t it?” Yes, Brad Pitt, it was dogshit, but on the plus side, he’s never made anything worse, and he got it out of the way fairly early.
