A favour gone disastrously wrong: the Morgan Freeman movie that made £46 at the box office
He might have been almost a quarter of a century into his career before becoming a movie star, but Morgan Freeman was determined to make up for lost time and ensure he didn’t slip out of the spotlight once he finally made it.
His first screen credit came in 1964, but it wasn’t until 1987’s crime drama Street Smart landed him on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ that he became a hot commodity. Quickly establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most sonorous exposition machines, Freeman settled into his groove as a gravitas-laden favourite who could elevate even the most leaden dialogue with nothing more than his silky smooth voice.
The actor’s cumulative box office now sits north of $11 billion to make him one of the highest-grossing performers the business has ever seen, and he’s become synonymous with showing up in action-packed blockbusters and genre films as cinema’s marquee wizened sage, a market he could realistically corner all to himself now that his friend and frequent co-star Michael Caine has retired.
Of course, there will always be misses to go along with the hits, and Freeman has experienced his fair share of those, too. In recent years, he’s been popping up in all sorts of forgettable nonsense, even if it’s hard to accuse him of slumming it when he’s never been shy in admitting he’ll happily take on a bad movie if he knows there’s going to be a hefty paycheque waiting for him.
Still, doing a favour for a friend backfired spectacularly when Freeman made the first move and offered himself to director Stephen Campanelli when he was ramping up his feature-length directorial debut. The end result was 2015’s dismal thriller Momentum, which recouped the princely sum of £46 from its opening weekend in the United Kingdom.
Campanelli was a longtime member of Clint Eastwood’s production crew who’d worked with Freeman on Red 2, Invictus, Million Dollar Baby, and The Sum of All Fears, among others. The actor reached out and put himself forward to play a supporting role in his frequent collaborator’s first time helming a movie of his own.
The results were dire from a critical perspective, with the formulaic story of Freeman’s corrupt senator looming large over a conspiracy revolving around Olga Kurylenko’s spy and James Purefoy’s thief being soundly dismissed by anyone who bothered to see it. In fairness, there weren’t many of them, with Momentum embarrassing itself at the box office.
Sure, it only played in ten UK cinemas, but two of those screenings didn’t even manage to sell a single ticket. The flick cost $20 million to produce, so it would be an understatement to say a three-day haul of less than £50 from British shores was a disaster.
