Unbreakable: 18 film stars impervious to box-office flops

by Steven Hyden, Noel Murray, Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias
January 21st, 2008

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