The Judi Dench movie disowned by the people who made it: “You’ve got to take it on the chin”
Since she’s one of stage and screen’s foremost living legends, one of her generation’s most decorated performers, and one of the finest actors of all time, if the opportunity arises to put Judi Dench in your movie, you should leap at the chance to put Judi Dench in your movie.
That isn’t a guarantee that the film will be any good, and she’d rather not be reminded of her extended cameo in Vin Diesel’s The Chronicles of Riddick, thank you very much, but it’s not often that a Dench-starring flick doesn’t just sink without a trace; it’s swept under the rug and buried by the people who made it.
In fact, it’s only happened once, and you can sort of understand why. For one thing, it was shit. A literary adaptation that doesn’t appeal to either fans of the source material or new converts is pretty much doomed to fail, and it also happens to be the single worst-reviewed feature that the Academy Award-winning dame has ever starred in.
Why did she make it, then? Probably because it was directed by Kenneth Branagh and he asked her to be in it, with the pair being friends and frequent collaborators for well over 35 years. If you had no idea that a big-budget blockbuster even exists where Dench plays an 800-year-old elf, then that’s OK, because Disney would prefer to pretend that Artemis Fowl never happened.
Based on Eoin Colfer’s bestselling book, the plan was for the flick to launch a franchise, as typically tends to be the case in Hollywood. The ‘Mouse House’ stumped up the princely sum of $125 million to fund the production, but the signs were never good. Shot in 2019, it was originally scheduled for a May 2019 release, before being pushed back to May 2020, and then ultimately getting dumped on streaming that June.
The early months of the pandemic were a time when everyone stayed indoors and binged the fuck out of whatever was on offer, but Artemis Fowl wasn’t even one of the 15 most-streamed titles of the year. Realising that it had wasted its money, when the time came for Disney to cut costs and shave a few pennies off its annual budget, the axe loomed large over the disastrous fantasy folly.
Even though it was a Disney production that debuted exclusively on Disney+, in May 2023, the movie was permanently removed from the platform, presumably so that the outfit didn’t have to honour the contracts of the cast and crew by paying them residuals, not that anyone was watching it anyway.
Before his feature had even been released, Branagh gave off the air of a man defeated, knowing that he’d made a stinker. “Impassioned fan response is a beautiful thing,” he said after being asked if he was concerned about any impending backlash. “And also, if you’re going to be bold enough to do one of these things, you’ve got to be able to take it on the chin.”
Disney spent an awful lot of money on Artemis Fowl for absolutely no return, and we can only hope that Dench was paid well for the worst movie she ever made, one that was distanced and ultimately disowned by the very people who footed the bill.
