The Jack Black movie so bad the studio said sorry for making it: “I apologise profusely”
Plenty of writers, directors, producers, and actors have apologised for making a bad movie, but one Jack Black picture was so irredeemably terrible that a studio mogul broke from industry protocol and issued a public apology for its existence, which should tell you how well it received.
Not to sound too harsh, but the boisterous actor and musician doesn’t make a lot of good films. School of Rock, High Fidelity, and Bernie are the undoubted highlights, but everything else ranges from so-so blockbusters like the Jumanji sequels and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, to atrocious outings in Eli Roth’s Borderlands, A Minecraft Movie, Year One, and Gulliver’s Travels.
Despite churning out such rampant mediocrity for the better part of 25 years, Black remains a popular figure, largely because he’s never come across as anything less than likeable. His schtick isn’t for everyone, but no matter how many appalling additions to his filmography he keeps racking up, he’ll never find himself out of work for too long.
One of the inevitabilities of carving out a career in Hollywood is that every performer and filmmaker will have one credit that ranks as the worst of their professional life. For some, the lows are still pretty high, but for others, the lows are embarrassing barrel-scrapers. In Black’s case, Jeffrey Katzenberg was forced to hold his hands up and confess that Barry Levinson’s Envy would have been better off not existing.
In theory, a black comedy helmed by a six-time Academy Award nominee who’d claimed the ‘Best Director’ prize for Rain Man, written by Kurt Vonnegut’s nephew, Steve Adams, and boasting a cast that saw Ben Stiller, Christopher Walken, Rachel Weisz, and Amy Poehler had plenty of potential.
In execution, though, it was a steaming pile of cinematic garbage. It’s the worst-reviewed movie Black has ever been in, it tanked at the box office after failing to recoup even half of its production budget, and became such a black mark against DreamWorks Pictures that the outfit’s co-founder didn’t even try and sweep it under the rug.
Shortly after Levinson’s horrendous flick was released in cinemas, Katzenberg found himself at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where he was hyping up the impending arrival of Shark Tale, the star-studded animation that featured Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Renée Zellweger, and, of course, Jack Black.
Addressing the elephant in the room, despite nobody asking him about it, Katzenberg voiced his regrets: “I apologise profusely for Envy,” he said, but it was too late. Over 20 years later, Black still hasn’t starred in anything worse, which is somewhere between remarkable and galling, considering there have been plenty of titles with claims to the throne since then.
Of course, all art is subjective, and there might even be a few folks who don’t think it’s that bad. However, when the person in charge of the studio responsible for a film says sorry, in public, for allowing it to make it through production and in front of the eyes of an unwitting public, it becomes a lot harder to defend.
