The 1994 sci-fi movie that refused to cast Marlon Brando: “Not going to justify the expenditure”
Even though the later years of his career were defined by apathy more than anything else, a legend is still a legend, which meant that Marlon Brando remained a valuable commodity until his dying day.
Obviously, it was a double-edged sword. Brando worked incredibly infrequently from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now on, making another ten movies in the next 22 years, and two of them were never even released. Most of the time, he phoned it in, and he was only there for the money.
The other edge of that blade was the notable fact that he was Marlon Brando, your favourite actor’s favourite actor of all time, and almost certainly the single most influential thespian in cinema history. As difficult, demanding, lazy, and disinterested as he was, having him in your film remained a very big deal.
The two-time Academy Award winner’s 1990s didn’t get off to the best of starts. He publicly savaged The Freshman, trashed the picture to anyone who would listen, and said it was so bad that he was retiring. As it transpired, he shit all over the crime comedy because he didn’t get the million dollars he’d asked for to shoot for a week longer than agreed, but when he got his money, he completely changed his tune.
He followed that up with a turn as Tomás de Torquemada in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, which he called the worst performance of his entire career, and while he may not have been too wide of the mark, his $5 million payday would have no doubt helped to soften that Razzie-nominated blow.
Brando wouldn’t be seen onscreen again until 1995’s Don Juan DeMarco, where he actually pulled his finger out of his arse and did some decent work for a change, but in between those two points, he voiced his desire to play the villainous Tolian Soran in the previous year’s sci-fi blockbuster, Star Trek Generations.
An easy sell to fans of the franchise, since it saw Patrick Stewart’s Next Generation crew crossing paths with William Shatner’s mob from the original series, having the Godfather icon on board would have added an extra dose of star power and potential appeal to non-Trekkies, but producer Sherry Lansing wasn’t having it.
“I went to Sherry and said, ‘Marlon Brando wants to play Soran,'” producer Rick Berman revealed. However, as was often the case with the unruly star, there was a catch. “But he wanted a huge amount of money. It was numerous millions of dollars, much more than she had any interest in playing. This was also at a point when he was quite overweight, and it was an action hero type of role.”
Lansing, who was nicknamed both ‘The Queen’ and ‘The Most Powerful Woman in Hollywood’ in her pomp, refused to budge. “My feeling was, ‘We’re talking about Marlon Brando here!'” Bergman offered. “But Sherry had remarkable experience in the motion picture business and said, ‘Brando’s presence is not going to justify the expenditure.'” She was probably right, and with Brando out, Malcolm McDowell got the job instead.
