1. Bruce Willis
All hail the Teflon don of cinematic failure. Over the course of his perhaps regrettably hyper-prolific career, Willis has appeared in some of the biggest, most notorious flops of the past few decades, golden turkeys like Sunset, Hudson Hawk, The Bonfire Of The Vanities, North, Breakfast Of Champions, The Story Of Us, and Perfect Stranger. Yet he remains one of Hollywood's biggest stars and most bankable names. It helps that Willis winks and smirks his way through many of his performances as a way of letting the audience know that he doesn't believe in the foolishness he's appearing in any more than they do.
2. George Clooney
Clooney became famous relatively late in life, on the strength of his smoldering, sensitive performance on the TV show ER, and by the time his face started getting splashed across the covers of Us and People, he'd developed a keen interest in not wanting to be embarrassed. After the well-paying debacle of Batman & Robin, Clooney made an overt retreat from blockbusters, cozying up to sympathetic auteurs like Steven Soderbergh and the Coen brothers (and some not-so-sympathetic ones, like Three Kings director David O. Russell), while cultivating a reputation as Hollywood's Gentleman Superstar. Television news pundits who oppose Clooney politically make a point of noting that his name rarely top-lines smash hits anymore, but that kind of windfall has rarely been the motivation for films like Solaris or Syriana, or Clooney's directorial efforts Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind and Good Night, And Good Luck. Clooney's picture still shows up in magazines and on entertainment shows—Fox News included—but he's now a movie star who enjoys being well-known while not much caring whether his movies are.
3. Brad Pitt
Like pal George Clooney, Pitt favors challenging roles in off-kilter fare. Also as with Clooney, those quirky projects tend to flop miserably, as have pretty much all his films from the past decade that didn't have "Ocean" or "Mr. & Mrs." in their titles. The critically revered, audience-resistant The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is the latest and most dramatic example of Pitt's propensity for high-minded flops, though it's hard to understand how a film with a title like that could fail to draw in the masses. Even Fight Club, Pitt's defining triumph, was a sizable commercial failure upon its theatrical release, as were the less-beloved Meet Joe Black, Spy Game, The Mexican, Seven Years In Tibet, The Devil's Own, Cool World, and Kalifornia. Yet Pitt retains his superstar status in no small part because he looks the part; he's still considered big even as the grosses for his pictures shrink.
4. Nicole Kidman
Few actresses have had as catastrophic a year at the box office as Kidman in 2007, when two expensive would-be blockbusters—The Invasion and The Golden Compass—suffered mediocre reviews and piddling receipts. (Buried between the flops? Kidman's career-best performance in Margot At The Wedding, an arthouse effort with similarly modest returns.) In the years since Kidman made a movie-star impact in The Others and delivered an Oscar-winning turn in The Hours, her successes have mainly been in the minds of the critics who praised the likes of Dogville and Cold Mountain. The list of mainstream movies Kidman has appeared in since 2003 (The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter, Bewitched) is a roll call of fiscal misery, and her prestige-film fare (Birth, Fur, The Human Stain) hasn't gotten much more traction. Lately, Margot aside, Kidman's artistic and business instincts have been flawed. If Baz Luhrmann's upcoming historical epic Australia doesn't hit, she may soon be reduced to living off Keith Urban's money.
5. John Travolta
Travolta's career has risen from the grave more times than a slasher-movie villain. By all rights, Travolta's post-Pulp Fiction comeback should have died following the historic disaster of Battlefield Earth, but after a punishing, flop-laden decade, this preternaturally resilient man-animal rebounded big time with big, flashy, embarrassing roles in two of last year's biggest sleeper hits: Hairspray (which really isn't so bad, once you take Travolta's bizarre stunt turn out of the equation) and Wild Hogs. No mere mortal should be capable of withstanding so many flops, yet Travolta's career is never quite down for the count. Let's face it: If you can survive Moment By Moment, Two Of A Kind, The Experts, Perfect, Mad City, Lucky Numbers, Battlefield Earth, A Love Song For Bobby Long, and Lonely Hearts, you can survive just about anything, up to and including a thermonuclear war and several zombie/robot resurrections.
6. Matthew McConaughey
The entertainment media is slow to admit a mistake, so the magazines that declared drawling Texan McConaughey the "star of the future" back in 1996 are partly to blame for a decade's worth of distractingly one-note performances, often in direct conflict with the tone and style of what's going on around them. To be fair, the public has also had a hand in McConaughey's stardom, by goosing flabby romantic comedies like The Wedding Planner and Failure To Launch to unexpected box-office success. But those same audiences haven't followed McConaughey to rugged action fare like Sahara or Reign Of Fire, even though his physical build and laconic personality is better suited to rakish-adventurer roles than emotionally complex love-interest parts. So McConaughey seems doomed to a career full of impossible choices: keep on doing what he's bad at, or risk disappointing the people who pony up the dough.
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