The Harder They Fall: 7.5 Former Box Office Goldmines

Remember when Jean Claude Van Damme was famous and people would pay real, negotiable currency to see his movies? Or Steven Seagal? Or Chuck Norris? Or Cher? Or everyone on this list? So do we.

Orson Welles

Arguably one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Orson Welles gave the world Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil and the 3rd Man, all three in the top 100 movies of all time according to the IMDb. In return, someone gave Welles Twinkies causing his body to expand at an exponential rate while his talent and passion for film seemed to be consumed like so much fluffy white Twinkie filth in the greasy clutches of an insatiable fat man.

In his later life, when Twinkies just weren’t taking the edge of not having enough money to finance his own projects, Welles turned to hooch. In a big way.

Sadly, he hadn’t considered taking up a job as entertainer at frat parties, so he continued to trod through attempts at making films and eventually found his way into starring opposite Pia Zadora and Ed McMahon in a film. If you don’t remember Pia Zadora it’s probably because you were sick that week she was famous. If you don’t remember Ed McMahon it’s because you’re not 90.

Possibly embracing his spiral into crapitude, two of Welles’ final roles couldn’t have been more depressing. A cartoon pigeon named Pippo and, finally, the voice of a giant, talking robot head named Unicron in the original animated Transformers movie. Which is poetic because, according to reports, Welles was little more than a giant head himself at that point.

Steve Guttenberg

From 1984 to 1988 Steve Guttenberg was the cinematic equivalent of a nudist supermodel answering your ad for a roommate. He was spectacular and had amazing breasts. The first four Police Academy films, Short Circuit and Cocoon were gold and appealed to even the insanely elderly movie goers. The man was on his game.

The turning point in his career came right around 1990 when this piece of shit came out.

Just look at that cast. Shelly Long, Jamie Gertz and Kyle Maclachlan, the guy who was too stupid to turn down Showgirls. How could this have bombed? How could this godawfully boring preview not have been part of a movie that rocked Guttenberg to the stratosphere of awesome?

Because it was followed by the even worse Three Men and a Little Lady, a movie that actually may have put the nail in the coffins of the careers of not just Guttenberg but Ted Danson and Tom Selleck as well, which is pretty impressive. The joke was these three guys are bumbling around raising a little girl. Ya know, the same joke from the first movie. So basically that one joke, but for four hours across two films.

After that lapse in judgment on Guttenberg’s part, he went on to star in winners like Zeus and Roxanne, a movie about a mangy dog and a dolphin and a made for TV Casper the Ghost movies. Inexplicably, he’s never caught on film weeping uncontrollably.

Lest you think he may have swallowed a bottle of pills to try and make all of that go away, think again. Guttenberg has 6 movies lined up for 200 alone and another for 2010. One stars Jessica Simpson and one stars Ed Begley Jr. Is that Oscar buzz we hear? No. No it’s not.

Molly Ringwald

If you were around in the mid 80’s then you probably remember wondering why the fuck people in movies thought Molly Ringwald was hot. Now that you’re older, you realize it was probably just John Hughes, the director of the Ringwald triumvirate of Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and the Breakfast Club being totally stalkerishly obsessed with her. It’s not outside the realm of possibility to speculate some of her panties may have gone missing on the sets of those movies. Somehow…

Despite that, those movies were huge, they’re still huge, and they’re the only reason that anyone knows who Molly Ringwald is today. After those John Hughes films, other directors tried to use her to make a buck in godawful romantic comedies like The Pick up Artist and For Keeps and a movie that was seriously called Fresh Horse where she again starred opposite effeminate douche Andrew McCarthy, the 80’s equivalent of Renee Zellwegger with an alleged penis. The movie was about as popular as the clap and so too became Ringwald.

So what’s a girl to do? Maybe a made-for-TV Stephen King adaptation would help, those rarely ever suck except for every single one ever made. You can judge for yourself if you care to watch it which a team of professionals from Harvard tell us may be the most boring thing ever and longest as well coming it at just over a bajillion hours of boring, boring crap.

Surprisingly, this didn’t do much for her career, nor did starring in a sitcom no one saw called Townies about three chicks living in a fishing community or a whale or something like that. Since that time, Molly’s most noticeable role has been a cameo in the cinematic opus that was Not Another Teen Movie, also known by its European title: Sex Academy.

Kevin Costner

There was about a 5 year period in history during which your mom loved Kevin Costner. When the Untouchables featuring Costner, Sean Connery and Robert De Niro came out, you had a good cast in a pretty decent flick. There was little if any reason to speculate Costner might be a total ass hat.

Costner followed that with a string of hits that were kind of queer to a greater or lesser degree, like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Field of Dreams. He hit pretty big with Dances with Wolves, an 18 hour epic in which he dances with wolves and wins some awards.

Then, in 1992, maybe drunk on his own sense of power by being in so many box office hits in such short order, Costner squatted over audiences and gave the world The Bodyguard, which is not unlike giving your mom crabs via the toilet seat. Loved by lonely girls who are lonely for a reason, the Bodyguard is cringe-worthy at best and started a downward spiral for Costner’s once amazing career. It tries to present Costner as a tough guy, something he’s never convincingly pulled off, while presenting Whitney Houston as not a pain in the ass, something she’s never done either.

From there, make your own jokes. Waterworld? The Postman? 3000 Miles to Graceland? Finally a bunch of movies no one even bothered to see after they checked out those last three. Costner started making vanity projects that contained more douche per square inch than a copy of Battlefield: Earth afloat on a sea of vinegar and water and audiences decided they’d spend their time better getting a good colon cleanser or napping.

Dan Aykroyd

In the early 80’s, Dan Aykroyd was one of the funniest comedians alive. After establishing himself on SNL, back before they fired all the funny people and replaced them with mouth breathers who didn’t make the cut at MadTV, Aykroyd gave the world The Blues Brothers, Trading Places and Ghostbusters. He continued making movies that were good enough to make us laugh for a few years, even if none of us could figure out what the fuck motivated them to end Ghostbusters 2 that way.

When the early 90’s hit, so too did some heinous form of Hollywood senility that left Aykroyd deranged and unpredictable. Not content with being funny or even tolerable, he made Nothing But Trouble. And while one or two mistakes are forgiveable, nothing could have prepared us for what came next.

According to Wikipedia, probably, the day Coneheads premiered is the only time in recorded history when everyone not currently picking their feet and smelling the results produced an aggravated, tired sigh at the exact same time. Not only was Coneheads about as dumb as it looks, it ushered in the Lorne Michaels tidal wave of shit ass movies based on SNL skits that could have stopped at Wayne’s World. Next time you see Stuart Saves his Family or It’s Pat; The Movie on at 3 am, thank Dan Aykroyd.

Aykroyd’s time as a lead in comedies dropped down considerably after this, giving him opportunity to co-star in mediocre films like Sgt Bilko and Tommy Boy. By the end of the 90’s his madness saw him desecrating classics with the release of Blues Brothers 2000. Finally, he succumbed to absolute crapitude by starring in made for TV sci-fi flicks like Earth vs The Spider and guest starring in the Fran Drescher sitcom Living with Fran, which you’ve probably never heard of, and for good reason.

Burt Reynolds

Before you were born, and back when your mother’s morals were looser than they are now, Burt Reynold’s was the boss. If Tom Jones and Bon Jovi had a baby, it would be an affront to the Lord, but if it was a woman back in the 60’s and 70’s, it would want to do Burt Reynolds. A more innocent and disturbing time, the fact is, women were all about this.

Reynolds had Gunsmoke, Deliverance and a string of other hits under his belt, not to mention the body of an upright yak. In the late 70’s however, giant star that he was, he started making curious career movies, like starring in Smokey and the Bandit, which is arguably the awesomest movie ever about moonshiners, but it still feature Sally Field in the romantic female lead role. Keeping in mind, Sally Field still looked like a sexless librarian, even back then. Still, the movie was mostly fun, so who cares?

Reynolds went on to star opposite some of the most bizarre choices in female casting the world has ever seen, with Candice Bergen, Julie Andrews and Liza Minelli, proving that apparently Jesus hates Reynolds, or at least didn’t want anyone to ever see him with a hot woman on screen ever again.

By the time 1993 rolled around, it was clear Reynolds’ star hadn’t just fallen, someone had thrown a snowball laced with ice hard feces at it and knocked it into a dumpster. What crawled out of that dumpster was this.

It’s hard to get a lot worse than that, and for much of the rest of his career Reynolds’ worked on direct to video releases, or the heinously unfunny sitcom Evening Shade, occasionally popping up in questionable cameo roles in mediocre films with the odd gem like Boogie Nights tossed in. Currently, Reynolds can be caught on screen in Dungeon Siege, a movie directed by Uwe Boll, which is the career equivalent of Reynolds giving handjobs in a Chinese restaurant’s men’s room while reciting lines from Death of a Salesman.

The Coreys

In the 80’s, nothing was cooler than Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. That last sentence was a lie. They were never really cool, but there were likely a strong contingent of unattractive and lonely girls who gave these two a fairly reliable career for a number of years. Separately they managed to make such films as Gremlins, Silver Bullet, The Goonies and Lucas, but once someone thought that two actors linked by nothing more than a name would be awesome together, pure shit gold was made.

The Lost Boys was big and featured not just the Coreys as a pair of comic book selling socially retarded children, but also Bill from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The actor may have had a real name, but no one cares. All you need to know is the Coreys tried to kill Jack Bauer and that equals box office magic.

This movie was quickly followed by License to Drive, which probably had something to do with cars, Dream a Little Dream, Blown Away (which was not gay porn), the much requested sequel to Dream a Little Dream and a few other movies that were set adrift on a sea of mediocrity in the hopes that Feldman and Haim would at least draw in enough pederasts and teen girls to make it profitable.

Somewhere around the 90’s, the Coreys decided they didn’t want to be a modern day Laurel and Hardy minus the comedy or bowler hat, so they parted ways, also deciding that they didn’t need to ever make money again as well.

Feldman’s corpse went on to voice Donatello in the live action teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. Haim opted to make dozens of direct-to-video movies no one would ever see, featuring the likes of Jennifer Beals and Brigitte Nielsen. Both Coreys then decided to become washed up substance abusers and then make a reality TV show, which is actually a legal requirement of being a celebrity and the last step before they’re found together nude and incoherent on a life raft set adrift in a drainage ditch.

You’ll notice the Corey’s did not get a Youtube link in this article, but that was not because none are available, rather because after so much shit we thought it’d be nice to end without having to watch Feldman and Haim homoeroticise their way through some awkward and poorly scripted scene.