This week is sort of like the bizarro version of the week in April that starts with the college basketball national championship game and MLB Opening Day and ends with Sunday at the Masters. Rather than being book-ended by some of the great events of the year, this week is book-ended by two of the most overblown events on the calendar: the NFL Combine and the Oscars.
While my disdain for the NFL Combine is well documented (just scroll down to the last two posts), I actually enjoy the Oscars and for the first time in years I have actually seen one of the best picture nominees (I will be cheering for you Quentin).But I also recognize that the Oscars are a little ridiculous, often ignoring the real best work done in favor of choices made for reasons like popularity, politics or just because someone has already won (see: Russell Crowe from Gladiator over Tom Hanks from Castaway – the Oscar version of Barkley over MJ for MVP – he was alone for the entire movie and made you care about a freaking volleyball!).
Anyway, in honor of the Oscars and the Combine I started thinking about how the phenomenon of the NFL Combine wunderkind also applies in Hollywood. An Acting Combine All-Star if you will.
If you want to play along at home, here is how you spot an Acting Combine All-Star (ACAS). There are three key elements to becoming an ACAS. An ACAS will: (1) Inexplicably star in a ton of movies despite (2) none of their movies doing very well at the box office and (3) their being horrible actors and horrible in every one of their films.
It is that simple. Despite hours of film that proves they aren’t good at their chosen profession they are still highly regarded because of some measurable seen by the executives in charge. Much like combine stars.
When I started thinking about this and who could potentially qualify, one name immediately jumped to mind. To quote him:
All right, all right, all right.
Matthew McConaughy is the poster child for the ACAS team.
While anecdotally I knew this to be true – that Matthew hasn’t made a decent film since his epic turn as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused – I couldn’t just throw out something like that without some quantitative data to back it up.
I hate those web sites where people just throw out definitive statements with no proof whatsoever.
Thanks to a totally awesome website (www.the-numbers.com) I was able to verify Matt’s ACAS credentials. Matt has starred in 28 movies that have in total brought in $1.171B in gross box office receipts (GBOR). On first glance that seems impressive, he has a “B” for billion in there. Not bad.
However, when you do the math, he has only a $41m average worldwide gross (AG) for each movie. In today’s bloated Hollywood that barely covers the cost of production.
It also doesn’t factor in movies where Matt was more of a supporting player – like Tropic Thunder which accounted for $188m (or 16%) of his total receipts.
Yet, despite having practically universally poor returns on every movie he makes, he continues to get cast in bad movie after bad movie.
He is the Jeff George of Hollywood. A guy who looks good on paper, seemingly having all the qualities that it takes to be a star – good looks, a seemingly likable personality and freakishly short arms to make him look better while shirtless (umm, let’s pretend I didn’t say that last one, ok?) – that continues to get work despite showing no results at all.
But Matt isn’t alone. After consultation with the PFB braintrust, here is my starting rotation of the ACAS team:
Kate Hudson – (17 movies / $873m GBOR / $51m AG) starring with fellow ACAS vet McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Fool’s Gold. An ACAS Perfect Storm!
NOTE: Amazingly How to Lose… was both Matt and Kate’s highest grossing star vehicle. So, maybe the secret is to not cast one ACAS team member but instead cast two – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts indeed.
Luke Wilson – (33 movies / $1.718b GBOR / $52m AG) hard to remember now but Mr. AT&T actually made movies before selling his indy-movie soul for that global telecom money. Of course, more people have seen him making Palin-esque arguments that have nothing to do with refuting the claims in the Verizon commercials than have seen Luke’s movies. His two highest grossing movies were Charlie’s Angels and…wait for it…Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, dreadful movies in which he had a tiny role. Remove those from his total and his average worldwide gross drops to a sub-McConaughy $39m per movie
Ethan Hawke – (32 movies / $843m GBOR / $26m AG) Fifteen years ago, Ethan Hawke was a rebel, mumbling his way through hip movies like Reality Bites and Before Sunrise. They may have helped his Gen X cred, bagged him the scariest looking ‘beautiful woman’ in Hollywood and convinced studio executives that he is cool but they didn’t sell any tickets and certainly haven’t helped any of his movies since be any good. Speaking of his Ex…
Uma Thurman – (32 movies / $1.572b GBOR / $49m AG) I know she is generally considered a great beauty and all, but I don’t see it. Combine that with bad movies and wooden acting and you have a career that is best summed by the fact that her best character didn’t even have a name.
Sarah Jessica Parker – (27 movies / $1.305b GBOR / $48m AG) Nearly a third of all of her revenues came from the Sex And The City movie. Note, she also starred in Failure to Launch with…Matt McConaughy. This is becoming like Six Degress of Matthew McConaughy, I guess with all those shirtless scenes, he gets some sort of funk on all these actresses when he works with them – some combination of body odor and bad acting I presume.
Wesley Snipes – (30 movies / #1.373b GBOR / $45m AG) OK, his legal problems the last few years probably hasn’t helped him but we forget all the horrid action movies he made (see Blade 1 – Blade 34, The Art of War, Murder at 1600) since he made Wildcats, Major League and White Men Can’t Jump. If he really was an NFL player, Wesley would’ve started his first two games before blowing out his ACL and limping through another 12 years as a special teams player refusing to retire.
Jean Claude Van Damme – (21 movies / $728m GBOR / $34m AG) – the Tony Mandarich of our list. He was big news in the early 90’s and rode large amounts of steroids to early stardom despite no talent what so ever.
Dane Cook – (10 movies / $336m GBOR / $34m AG) It was just a couple years ago that Dane Cook took his non-comedic comedy routine to the big screen and appeared in what seemed like 14 movies in the span of one year. Apparently it was only 10 movies. Yet, they all sucked. Was his massive suckitude found out in that time or he is just on a hiatus right now in between movies?
I think we can agree that we hope that all of the above are on a permanent hiatus.
But based on experience, I would guess they probably aren’t.
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