The awful 2002 movie script Rosario Dawson threw “in the garbage” but made anyway: “I knew”
Occasionally, there’s a certain pleasure in watching a movie you know is terrible, even if it’s just for morbid fascination’s sake, but then there also exists a sub-category of genuinely the worst films of all time, that can’t even be redeemed as ‘so bad they’re good’, with an example being Eddie Murphy’s Pluto Nash, featuring Rosario Dawson.
A science fiction ‘comedy’ from 2002 starring Murphy, Joe Pantoliano and Randy Quaid, Pluto Nash currently sports a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and that’s generous to be quite honest. Rather like his Netflix stablemate Adam Sandler, Murphy has that peculiar ability to make both absolutely brilliant and absolutely abysmal films in almost equal measure, and until they arrive, it’s tough to know what you’ll get, a bit like a box of chocolates that are half caramel and half sick flavoured.
But the premise alone for Pluto Nash should have been an alarm bell for all concerned: ‘Eddie Murphy plays a nightclub owner on the moon’ is an idea that most, if not all, people would have rightly screwed up into a ball, possibly set on fire first, and flushed down the toilet. However, at the start of the 2000s, the comedian was still hot property enough to get the thing commissioned, and so began four torturous years of production, the most frightening aspect of which was that $100million was spent making it.
At the time, Dawson was a young actor who was starting to make waves in Hollywood after some fine performances in movies like Larry Clark’s controversial Kids in 1995, then Spike Lee’s He Got Game opposite Denzel Washington and was about to enter the most successful period of her career, starting with the blockbuster Men in Black 2 with Will Smith.
But she didn’t manage to sidestep the horrified reaction to Pluto Nash, recalling to Rotten Tomatoes, “I knew. We knew we were making a bad movie. On that one, there was really no doubt about it. I read that script, and I threw it in the garbage. It’s called, ‘I was 19 years old, and I needed to get off my couch, man’.”
To be fair, Dawson wasn’t 19 when Pluto Nash came out, she was 23, but we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, and at least she can take solace from the fact that she apparently actually didn’t have that bad a time making the notorious flop.
She added, “Yo, that was an amazing experience. We had a ball doing that project; there just was not a good movie to show for it, you know? Sometimes it’s the exact opposite; you work with people you hate, and then the movie’s great, and you gotta talk about it all happily, when it’s like, ‘Actually, I hated working on that movie’. But this one was one that was really great.”
On release, Pluto Nash did predictably abysmally, earning just $7m back of that $100m spent at the box office and collecting five Golden Raspberry award nominations the following year. It didn’t affect Dawson’s career too much, as she would make the Oliver Stone hit Alexander in 2004 and more than 100 more movies and TV shows in the two decades since.
Murphy, meanwhile, went on to make several other films that are as bad, if not worse than Pluto Nash, including Norbit, The Haunted Mansion and 2012’s A Thousand Words, which is one of the few films in history to proudly display the hallowed 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
