The wretched movie Rachel Weisz refused to promote: “It’s just an entertainment”
While it’s hard to prove whether an actor promoting their movie actually moves the needle in terms of ticket sales, one thing is certain: it actively hurts a film if they don’t. Just ask Rachel Weisz.
Back in 2011, Weisz took the lead in a dark psychological thriller helmed by a multiple-time Oscar nominee. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill horror flick knocked together for a quick buck on opening weekend – far from it.
With backing from Universal Pictures and Morgan Creek Productions, and a hefty $50million budget, Dream House was a proper prestige project. Starring alongside Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts, Weisz was part of a cast that Universal clearly believed in, convinced that My Left Foot director Jim Sheridan could deliver something a cut above the usual fare.
Unfortunately for everyone involved – and I literally mean everyone – Dream House turned into an unmitigated disaster.
According to an unnamed source who worked on the film, Sheridan basically threw out the script early in the production, preferring to shoot scenes in a largely improvised fashion. That might have worked brilliantly for him on dramas like In the Name of the Father and In America, but it was a risky approach to take for a horror-ish film that lived and died on its twisting, turning plot.
To Sheridan’s dismay, not long after he turned in his first cut, Morgan Creek organised a test screening that resulted in some truly chastening scores from the audience. The production company ordered reshoots, but mustn’t have been happy with them, because the project was then taken out of Sheridan’s hands completely and re-edited.
At this point, Sheridan, who didn’t have final cut privilege and therefore couldn’t stop the studio from futzing with his film, appealed to the Directors Guild of America to have his name taken off the credits. He wasn’t successful in this desperate bid to disassociate himself from the movie, though, and had to make his peace with having his name on a stinker that would be ripped apart upon release. However, he wasn’t contractually obliged to promote it if he didn’t want to, so he outright refused.
All in all, it was a sad ending to the project for the director, who initially saw it as something fun that would cleanse his palette of the serious dramas he is more closely associated with. “It’s just wanting to do something lighter,” he told Digital Spy before everything went pear-shaped. “It’s not light, but it’s something different that’s not war in Ireland or America or political. It’s just an entertainment.”
For Universal and Morgan Creek, though, there were worse things on the horizon than their director disowning his own movie. You see, Weisz and Craig, who began dating on the film and would later marry, felt the same about the studio-mandated final cut. To them, it was a Frankenstein’s Monster of different voices all coming from different angles, instead of the vision of one man, and they hated it with a passion.
So, backing their director to the hilt, the cast also bowed out of interviews and gave the premiere a miss. It didn’t take long for audiences to clock that something was off – if the stars couldn’t be bothered to promote the film, it hardly screamed confidence. As expected, Dream House tanked, pulling in just $40m at the box office, a full ten mil shy of breaking even. In the end, it was quietly tossed on the pile with all the forgettable horror flicks it so desperately wanted to rise above.
