Five ambitious movies that took big swings and missed by miles
In Hollywood, ambition is a beautiful thing. After all, it takes an incredible amount of guts, willpower, and sheer gumption to mount a production of any kind, especially when there’s no guarantee any project will succeed. This is why ambition should always be applauded when it is married to the kind of creative big swings that surprise audiences.
In the recent months of 2024 alone, two hugely ambitious movies have been widely released: Todd Phillips’ musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux and Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project Megalopolis. Both films eschewed the easy path of giving audiences what they’d come to expect and instead forged a new path.
Sadly, though, both movies’ big swings seem to have missed by miles. Joker: Folie à Deux has divided its fanbase and will finish its run with a box-office take barely a fraction of the first film. Megalopolis has been widely dismissed as another one of Coppola’s follies—a strange, unwieldy film that has alienated most people who have seen it.
The receptions afforded to these films made us ponder five other recent movies which took big swings and missed, whether for creative or financial reasons.
Five ambitious movies that flopped:
5. Napoleon (Ridley Scott, 2023)
Before Ridley Scott’s Napoleon hit screens in November 2023, fans of the director were preparing themselves for another one of his signature historical epics. The trailer looked like it had many large-scale battles, rip-roaring action, palace intrigue, and Joaquin Phoenix returning to the kind of film he and Scott had experienced so much success with on Gladiator. After people saw the film, though, they were understandably bemused.
You see, while Scott delivered on the battles, action, and palace intrigue, he also made Napoleon a quirky comedy – and a large portion of the audience felt this didn’t work. It meant the movie’s tone was jarring, with the juxtaposition of epic, wide-scale history and Phoenix’s portrayal of Napoleon as a horny, socially inept weirdo being too strange for some. The movie became meme material, mainly thanks to Phoenix’s hilarious delivery of the line, “You think you’re so great because you have boats”. However, I’m not sure how many people were laughing ‘with’ the film instead of ‘at’ it.
4. Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green, 2022)
In some ways, David Gordon Green’s modern Halloween trilogy is a triumph. It brought everyone’s favourite pale-masked holiday killer back in a big way, with the first movie, in particular, proving that there’s still a lot of life left in that murderous old dog. The second entry – Halloween Kills – was less well-received by fans and critics but was still generally on the right side of the line. People appreciated what Green was trying to do by expanding the story and making it a tale of a city driven mad by fear, even if he didn’t fully land that plane.
By the time the third entry came around, though, Green took another big creative swing – and this time, it most definitely didn’t pay off. All the marketing materials promised fans a final epic showdown between Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode and her nemesis Michael Myers. Hence, they were pretty darn mad when they got the story of a random Haddonfield teen becoming a serial killer instead. This bizarre choice takes up most of the film, with only the last act reverting to a battle between Laurie and Michael. It was almost as if Green was obligated to deliver this showdown but had no real interest in it – and it showed.
3. Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023)
We promise we’re not trying to pick on Joaquin Phoenix in this article—it’s just that the man has a tendency to make big swings in his movie choices, and some of them miss the mark. This isn’t to say he shouldn’t keep taking these risks, though. His fearless approach to movie stardom has led to gems like You Were Never Really Here, Her, and The Sisters Brothers. You do you, Joaquin – we’ll just be here to gently point out when things don’t go so well.
To be fair, Phoenix was nominated for a Golden Globe for Beau is Afraid, Hereditary director Ari Aster’s third movie, so he’d probably argue his big swing paid off. For general audiences, though, who had helped make Hereditary and Midsommar genuine indie hits for the director, Beau was too far into the surreal realm. Its “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach to genre and tone gave those who went to see it whiplash, while the nearly three-hour runtime likely put off others who might have been tempted to give it a go.
2. Luther: The Fallen Sun (Jamie Payne, 2023)
As a television show, the BBC’s Luther never concerned itself with “realism”. It often felt like Idris Elba’s impossibly cool, impossibly tortured DCI John Luther couldn’t leave his apartment without tripping over a serial killer. Perhaps this is why, when it came time to transfer the character to the big screen – or, more accurately, the Netflix screen – creator Neil Cross and director Jamie Payne seized the opportunity to abandon reality altogether.
The resulting film – Luther: The Fallen Sun – plays more like a street-level superhero movie than a standard police whodunnit. Luther gets involved in an action-packed jailbreak and ends up facing off with his nemesis in a bunker in rural Norway before a final encounter on a frozen lake. Andy Serkis’ villain is more akin to the likes of the Joker than the heightened criminals Luther encountered in the show, and it’s all a bit jarring. Fans seemed to like the movie enough, but an air of confusion definitely lingered over it, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the creators dialled things back for future Luther adventures.
1. Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022)
Babylon is an incredible film, yet it’s also a big swing and a miss. How can this be? Well, creatively, the film is astonishing. Damien Chazelle—riding high after the triple whammy of Whiplash, La La Land, and First Man—was given a cast of A-list talent and an $80million production budget to make a three-hour exploration of Hollywood’s excesses during the transition from the silent era to talkies at the end of the 1920s. That’s just about the biggest swing a motion picture can take in the modern climate – but it didn’t pay off.
While the film received three Academy Award nominations, it wasn’t nearly as critically lauded as his previous efforts. Many critics dismissed it as a case of style over substance at best and self-indulgence at worst, and it didn’t perform well at the box office either. A worldwide return of $63m meant that the film lost Paramount a staggering $87.4m after promotional costs were factored in. Ouch.
