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'Live by Night' and 'Silence' flop: Are passion projects dead at the box office?

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Love may be blind, but it can also be deaf – especially to discouraging words.

As we write this, Ben Affleck is still out promoting Live by Night, his directing/writing/starring/producing turn, based on a book by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River). This, even though the movie already opened to a worldwide gross of $10 million, a sliver of its budget.

Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese is getting no traction out of Silence, his 28-year passion project based on a 1966 novel about two Christian missionaries searching for their mentor in 17th Century Japan. The awards buzz is underwhelming and a worldwide box office of $8 mil reads like they forgot a digit.

Is it possible to love a movie idea too much? Here are some passion projects that were doomed love affairs.

DUNE – Frank Herbert’s 20-pounds-of-words about the byzantine politics surrounding the desert planet Arrakis is the La Brea Tar Pits of bad movie ideas. The first film I distinctly remember a director (David Lynch) removing his name from, it earlier broke the heart of Alejandro Jodorowsky (check out the impressive doc Jodorowsky’s Dune). And it’s still floating around to be rebooted by somebody with a career-death wish.

BATTLEFIELD EARTH – Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard may be dead, but his words, including his early sci-fi novels, live on to clear the minds of people like John Travolta. Travolta thought a movie based on Hubbard’s novel – about Earthlings fighting against the 1,000-year domination of alien Psychlos – would be a fitting tribute to his lost leader. It’s considered one of the biggest movie bombs of all time.

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE – After 17 years, this Terry Gilliam film has yet to be made. Its latest incarnation was set to shoot in October with Adam Driver but was spiked at the 11th hour. Johnny Depp was in the original in 2000, but it was called off after a few days of filming for budget/production problems. A very good doc, Lost in La Mancha, was made about that disaster. “I want to get this film out so I can get on with the rest of my life,” Gilliam said last year at Cannes.

SWEPT AWAY – Not sure what the glue was in the Madonna/Guy Ritchie marriage, but they both were dying to be taken seriously by the film world. What better way than to remake Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 film about a working-man and a rich-witch marooned on an island, where his sexual domination of her becomes a class-struggle metaphor? The movie more or less marked the end of Madonna’s acting career.

AFTER EARTH – You can’t blame a guy for wanting to give his son a lift into movie superstardom by teaming up for a big-budget sci-fi film. But Will and Jaden Smith’s monstrous bomb, about a space captain and his son trapped on an evolutionarily gonzo Earth, practically screams, “Maybe I should have just given him a car!”

BEYOND THE SEA – Kevin Spacey was always a fan of the late pop star Bobby Darin, who died in 1973 at age 37. Spacey’s lifelong dream of playing him came true in 2004, when Spacey was already 45, and looking every year of it. Nobody was buying it.

HOWARD THE DUCK – George Lucas was a big fan of the dark absurdist tone of the Marvel comic book. So when he stepped back from Lucasfilm in 1984 to produce his own films, Hollywood had a blank cheque ready for whatever his genius muse dictated. In this case, it was a live action movie about a horny duck from space. How could it miss?

CALIGULA – Bona fide intellectual Gore Vidal wrote a sincere script about the life of the debauched roman emperor. The only one who’d put up the money was Penthouse magazine magnate Bob Guccione. Guess who got to direct? The result was hard-core porn that happened to have Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren in it.

HUDSON HAWK – Get a few Die Hard movies under your belt, and the people you’ve made rich will let you make that inevitable vanity project. In this case, it’s a 1991 madcap action comedy, starring in and written by Willis, with a title song also written by him. (It has musical numbers, sung by Willis and Danny Aiello. Seriously).

AT LONG LAST LOVE – A bad idea for a musical is like a bad idea times 10. The bad idea for this 1975 fiasco – an homage to Cole Porter, with Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd – came courtesy of writer/producer Peter Bogdanovich. So many great bad reviews, but we’ll leave you with this one from the Los Angeles Times’ John Barbour. "Burt Reynolds sings like Dean Martin with adenoids and dances like a drunk killing cockroaches.”

Twitter: @jimslotek

JSlotek@postmedia.com

 

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