The cursed Sean Connery movie that ended two careers
No actor or filmmaker wants to be part of a movie that goes down in history as a career-killer, but sometimes fate can conspire to end two professional livelihoods in one fell swoop. Sean Connery discovered this during one of the most torturous productions of his career.
In the early days of the 21st century, the success of Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man convinced every major studio in Hollywood that any comic book property that sold a decent amount of copies was fair game. This resulted in an alarming increase in quantity over quality.
On paper, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had plenty of potential, with Alan Moore’s source material broadly comparable to a steampunk version of The Avengers. It featured literary figures, including Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, and Dr Henry Jekyll, partnering up to solve a vast conspiracy that threatens the world.
Fresh from his own contributions to rehabilitating the struggling genre with 1998’s Blade, Stephen Norrington signed on to direct and recruited Connery as Quartermain. Unfortunately, the two would end up despising each other with an intense and burning passion that effectively ruined both of their careers.
Matters weren’t helped by Prague’s worst floods in a century, destroying expansive sets worth millions of dollars, delaying filming by weeks and necessitating a relocation to Malta. And yet, the studio refused to extend the shooting schedule because there was a release date to be met, which only exacerbated the issues between director and star.
They did manage to put their differences aside to at least complete The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, only for Norrington to skip the premiere completely. When Connery was asked for the filmmaker’s whereabouts, he instructed reporters to “check the local asylum”.
Describing his time on set as “a nightmare”, Connery proclaimed that he was “fed up dealing with idiots”. Having averaged roughly one film per year since 1957, the original James Bond formally announced his retirement three years after The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen arrived with a thud in cinemas, having decided that his nightmarish collaboration with Norrington was the catalyst for calling it a day.
As for the director, he was announced to be directing the Clash of the Titans remake that was eventually helmed by Louis Leterrier, revealed as the man to reboot The Crow in a project that’s finally coming to screens next year with Rupert Sanders behind the camera, and signed on for supernatural thriller The Lost Patrol in 2010.
The latter didn’t happen, either, leaving The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a curious footnote in cinema history that ended two careers. Connery was one of the industry’s most iconic stars, and Blade had many predicting the brightest of futures for Norrington, but putting the two of them together only served to accelerate their respective exits from their professions.
