An unfortunate swansong: five movies so bad they were the last of their kind
Every director to have ever picked up the megaphone dreams of making a movie that changes cinema forever. Plenty of them have done exactly that, even if there are an unfortunate few who’ve accomplished their ultimate goal for the wrong reasons.
Just as every filmmaker wants to push the medium to new heights, no auteur sets out to intentionally make a bad movie. While there’s a school of thought that suggests it’s better to be terrible than forgettable, nobody has an explanation for how certain films can go so awry they end up as the last of their kind.
Obviously, there are several common threads, mostly the fact that all of the following five titles were terrible pictures that bombed thunderously and lost a lot of money. It’s one thing killing an entire genre, but it takes a special kind of shoddy to fail on such a scale that nobody follows in those footsteps again.
In every case, there was at least one spiritual predecessor that came before, but because these movies were such cataclysmic misfires, there were none that came after.
Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)
While plenty of viewers are willing to die on the hill that Michael Cimimo’s Heaven’s Gate is an unfairly overlooked and unjustly treated masterpiece, there clearly weren’t many of those defenders around when the film crashed into cinemas in 1980.
A three-for-one special, the notorious flop wreaked havoc on multiple fronts. Not only did it effectively end Cimino’s mainstream career, but it also closed the door on the age of the epic – and expensive – studio western and convinced the studios that the ‘New Hollywood’ movie brats were being given too much oversight and creative freedom.
It instigated an industry-wide shift that changed the business forever, which may never have happened were Heaven’s Gate anywhere near as impeccable – or even enjoyable – as its most ardent of backers claim.
Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002)
The finger of blame has often been pointed at Austin Powers for necessitating James Bond’s shift into more serious and straight-laced territory, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that Die Another Day was crap.
A combination of Mike Myers’ shagadelic spoof, the release of Matt Damon’s The Bourne Identity several months previously, and the arrival of Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer on the small screen the year beforehand had already rendered 007 as a relic of a time cinematic spycraft had left behind.
It might have left theatres as the highest-grossing Bond movie ever, but thanks to some woeful dialogue, two-bit characterisation, and sloppy CGI, the secret agent’s tongue has been forcibly removed from his cheek as the high camp spy caper bid a permanent farewell, with its closest successor the overbearing smugness Matthew Vaughn has banked his career on.
Cool World (Ralph Bakshi, 1992)
Robert Zemeckis‘ Who Framed Roger Rabbit soared past $350 million at the box office, won four Academy Awards, and spectacularly repaid the risky gambit of combining live-action components with traditionally animated characters.
Sensing a gap in the highly specific and niche market, Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World was pitched as an R-rated companion piece that would use many of the same techniques, albeit with a raunchier and more profane edge. It was a decent idea in theory, if not in execution.
Paramount pushed the boat out to market Cool World as a must-see, only for the studio to pull all advertising after its opening weekend, where it imploded on impact at the multiplex. Abhorred by critics and ignored by audiences, funnily enough, nobody else was in a rush to make an adult-skewing hybrid of live-action and hand-drawn animation.
Mars Needs Moms (Simon Wells, 2011)
For years, that man Zemeckis was adamant that dead-eyed motion capture movies ripped right from the uncanny valley were the future of cinema, only for Mars Needs Moms to fail so embarrassingly that he was left with no other choice but to admit defeat.
The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol saw the Oscar-winning director bet big on the technology, which Steven Spielberg even co-opted in The Adventures of Tintin. That movie never got its much-touted sequels, which probably has an awful lot to do with Mars Needs Moms.
Released nine months before Tintin, the mo-capped monstrosity lost so much money that Zemeckis’ ImageMovers Digital fired 450 staff, canned every one of its in-development projects, and ceased operations altogether. Motion capture remains a key part of blockbuster filmmaking, but Mars Needs Moms single-handedly killed the unsettling rise of uncanny valley family films.
The Cat in the Hat (Bo Welch, 2003)
The only reason Mike Myers agreed to star as the title character in The Cat in the Hat was to avoid being sued, which is never a solid foundation for an expensive production.
The actor and comedian scrapped his own Saturday Night Live spinoff Dieter’s Day because he hated the script he’d written himself and faced legal action from Universal, who’d already spent millions on development. As part of the settlement, he agreed to star in another film from intended Dieter’s Day director Bo Welch, which couldn’t have gone much worse.
Nominated for ten Razzies, the response to The Cat in the Hat was so vitriolic that Dr Seuss’ widow, Audrey Geisel, banned any adaptations of her late husband’s work from being made in live-action. She died in 2018, but her wishes are still being respected, with every movie based on the author’s stories since sticking to animation.
