I read an article a while back about this. A few were bizarre, like how DiCaprio starred in a movie called Don’s Plumb that he never expected anyone outside of film festivals to see and sued to prevent it from being released for years.
The one that caught my attention is the never released movie by Jerry Lewis called The Day the Clown Cried. It is about an alcoholic clown during WW2 who gets arrested by the Nazis for mocking Hitler and ends up leading a bunch of Jewish kids to their deaths in the gas chamber.
Lewis swore it would never be released and only a handful of people have ever seen it. He kept the only copy locked in his house somewhere.
There are going to be a lot of movies that dont see light of day as streaming services are taking the writeoff for new content that tests badly rather than putting it out there
Alec Guiness was notoriously embarrassed about his role in Star Wars. Less the film itself and more so the fan obsession and it’s domination over his previous theatrical and film achievements
I read once that Aston Kutcher didn’t like or promote Butterfly Effect. Then a few years later I did see an interview where he talked about it, so not sure if any of it was correct.
Butterfly Effect was a great film, imo it was his best role…at least without any comedy behind it…
It made him and his family rich though…they are still getting paid for it.
He was originally offered 150k for the role, He renegotiated for double that, and 2% of the backend gross. Lucas threw in an additional .25% out of goodwill.
It earned Guinness almost $7 million immediately, and he had earned 95 million from it at the time of his death. His family is still getting paid.
Bill Cosby was very vocal about the terribleness of Leonard Part 6 (it wasn’t actually a sixth part of anything) and he flat out told people to not see it.
Keanu Reeves was forced to appear in the movie The Watcher, a movie he didn’t want to be in and doesn’t like.
His signature actually got forged on the agreement by a friend of his, Keanu couldn’t prove it was forged, and didn’t want to get sued, so he did the movie anyway.
Stallone apparently tried to get the Rambo cartoon series that was on Saturday Mornings stopped because he didn’t think this traumatized war hero should be used to sell toys.
He was told they weren’t using his likeness, but a likeness based on his character, so he didn’t own the rights to that. Not sure how they were able to use the same name though.
I think Stallone had only the rights for the film (which had first been acquired by several different parties over the years), and not for anything else.
