The movie George Clooney refused to be in: “No fucking way”
Peer pressure can be a hell of a difficult thing to ignore in any walk of life, but George Clooney steadfastly refused to be swayed into signing onto a project that already had a cavalcade of Hollywood superstars attached, and it would be an understatement to say it turned out to be the smartest play.
Of course, the actor had been very careful and selective over which roles he would sign on for in the aftermath of Batman & Robin, with Clooney’s supposed breakthrough as a certifiable cinematic leading man instead yielding one of the worst big-budget blockbusters that has ever been made.
If anything, the failure of Joel Schumacher’s neon-and-nipples extravaganza was the best thing that ever happened to him, considering Clooney’s renewed focus on choosing the best parts as opposed to the biggest ones leading him to carve out a career as an esteemed, acclaimed, and two-time Academy Award-winning performer and filmmaker.
As a result, he’s developed the ability to smell a stinker from a mile away, a sixth sense that saw him steer as far clear of the abysmal Movie 43 as possible. According to Peter Farrelly – one of the anthology comedy’s many directors – Clooney was approached to play a version of himself who struggled to pick up women, with the star’s succinct response of “no fucking way” ending the conversation then and there.
Hugh Jackman wasn’t quite so fortunate and decided that playing a man with a pair of testicles on his neck was a shrewd career move, only to end up calling Movie 43 the one film in his career he’d warn himself against appearing in were he suddenly rendered capable of time travel.
A winner of Golden Raspberry Awards for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Screenplay’, and ‘Worst Director’, the list of names who did agree to show their faces in Movie 43 beyond Jackman is nothing short of staggering, based entirely on the fact the end result is perhaps the single worst star-studded studio comedy that’s ever been released to the general public.
Kate Winslet, Gerard Butler, Halle Berry, Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jeremy Allen White, Chris Pratt, Naomi Watts, Uma Thurman, Liev Schrieber, Seth MacFarlane, Anna Faris, and Johnny Knoxville were all present and accounted for, while James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, and Elizabeth Banks joined the Farrelly brothers on directorial duties.
It would be entirely fair to say that Clooney dodged a bullet, then, because if he had appeared in Movie 43 then Batman & Robin, Grizzly II: Revenge, or Return of the Killer Tomatoes stood a very good chance of being dislodged as the single worst motion picture of his entire career. It really is that bad, but at least he had the wherewithal to immediately snub any overtures made in his direction.
