5 Huge Upcoming Movies That Are Completely Doomed

5

Steve Jobs' Ghost Is Clearly Sabotaging His Third Biopic

Unfortunately for the serious-eyebrowed method actors of Hollywood, the moviegoing public has made it clear that they don't give one solitary monkey-slapping shit about the life story of the guy who gave them their iPods. Despite Ashton Kutcher's batshit dedication and surprisingly good performance, Jobs is ridiculous, while the intentionally ridiculous iSteve is just god-awful. Short of getting the exact same guys who did The Social Network, nothing could get people excited about a studio making another Steve Jobs movie.

So that's exactly what Sony decided to do.

theverge.com

Now we're talking! Who better than David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin to tell us the story of another arrogant, somewhat misogynistic blowhard whose products we use every day? And they even had Christian Bale on board as Jobs ... for like 15 minutes, before it all fell apart.

theverge.com
"I'm sorry, but my MySpace Tom dream project just opened up."

Apparently, Sony fired Fincher after he asked for too much money and replaced him with Danny Boyle. They also replaced Bale with Leonardo DiCaprio -- which, hey, isn't a terrible trade-off, right? The Beach aside, those two are usually pretty good. Except ...

theverge.com

theverge.com
"Headline Writer Extremely Confused Right Now."

Yep, after meeting with Boyle, DiCaprio decided he didn't need an Oscar that badly after all. Boyle went back to Bale, but he had a change of heart as well. Boyle has since met with tons of actors, including Matt Damon and Bradley Cooper, but no one wants to touch the movie. Does Boyle secretly smell or something? Why is everyone repelled as soon as they talk to him? And that includes Sony, who eventually dropped the project.

Universal took their sloppy seconds, but after nearly a year of talent musical chairs, the future is looking pretty bleak for Jobs 2: Electric Boogaloo. On the upside, they probably still have Seth Rogen as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, so there's that.

4

Nicolas Cage Is Apparently Cursed Now

It seems that even abstract concepts like fate are over Nicolas Cage, as two of his latest projects have fallen victim to bizarre calamities straight out of, well, a Nicolas Cage movie. The first was when director Paul Schrader walked away from thriller The Dying of the Light during editing -- according to the producers, because Schrader took too many liberties with the script, so they re-edited it without him. Bear in mind that, based on the official trailer, in this film Cage plays a CIA agent with dementia who goes rogue. That's the sane version of the movie.

Incidentally, this is the director who once showed his penis to Lindsay Lohan to motivate her.

Lionsgate Home Entertainment
"That's it. Just a few more moments, Paul. I'm almost in the zone."

Weirder still, the controversy first came to people's attention through an anonymous Facebook page decrying that "control of the film was taken away from Mr. Schrader" and demanding that "Schrader and Cage's version of the film is seen [sic] to the public as the director intended!" It turns out that Facebook likes don't actually serve as legal injunctions, though, so these demands were never met, and we never even found out who created the page.

Facebook
Whoever it was, they also started the "Paul Schrader's enormous penis" fan page.

Only a few days later, Cage's Outcast was scheduled to premiere in China when the Chinese producers pulled the film mere hours before its release, indefinitely and with no explanation. It's since been pushed to next year. The issue may have been dong-related -- the same thing happened in China with Django Unchained last year -- or maybe they just saw Cage's performance and didn't like it. Either way, the problem is dicks.

3

The Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper Movie They Don't Want You to See

Last month, the BFI London Film Festival showed a screening of Danish director Susanne Bier's latest film, Serena, and the response was what could politely be called "more confused than David Duke at a Rihanna concert." Serena stars Jennifer Lawrence as the murderous title character and Bradley Cooper as the man who somehow loves her, probably because he's a nightmare himself. In the beginning, everything is going peachy keen for these assholes, until Serena miscarries a child and goes all Fatal Attraction after suspecting that her husband is caring for the child he had with a previous partner. Also, there's timber-related drama. And it's the '30s. Honestly, we watched the trailer and we're still not sure what's going on.

Magnolia Pictures
Oh, that clears things up.

Why did two stars of this stature agree to be in this confusing mess? Probably because it was filmed two and a half years ago, before Lawrence and Cooper became Hollywood royalty (for winning an Academy Award and voicing Rocket Raccoon, respectively). Then everyone got busy and sorta forgot about it, apparently. Since then, it's been proven that "Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are insane" is a winning formula, which probably had a not-small part in resurfacing this train wreck.

Magnolia Pictures
"Can't we just cut the left half of the poster and call this Two Famous Faces?"

The backtracking started right away after it received overwhelmingly bewildered reviews and Bier insisted that it was never intended for a mainstream audience. Right, it's not that your movie is shitty, we just don't get it. That's probably why everyone has so much confidence in it that Cooper personally stepped in to oversee the editing process and a video on demand release has been scheduled a full month before it hits theaters.

2

Jane Got a Gun Makes Less Sense Than an Aerosmith Video

The grammatically ambiguous Jane Got a Gun, a Western drama starring Natalie Portman, has been plagued from day one. Or day zero, actually, since director Lynne Ramsay quit before the first day of filming. It wasn't the first personnel problem on the set, though -- just one week before, leading man Michael Fassbender dropped out, hastily replaced by Joel Edgerton. Who is Joel Edgerton? Exactly.

Anthony Harvey/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Pictured: Not Magneto

Edgerton had previously been cast in a different role, which was taken over by Jude Law. Still with us? Well, the day after Ramsay left, Law went with her. He was briefly replaced by Bradley Cooper before he suddenly remembered that he needed to go get nominated for an Oscar. The role was eventually recast a third goddamn time with Ewan McGregor, because his collaborations with Portman have always worked out so well. Hey, wait a minute ...

Lucasfilm
Pictured: Not [whoever played Luke's Uncle Owen originally]

It was at this point that someone decided they needed to rewrite the script. Toddlers in a room full of broken glass and a cookie jar on the opposite side have shown better foresight.

Following a nasty lawsuit against Ramsay that involved accusations of substance abuse and pointing guns at things you really should not point guns at, the studio made possibly its first good decision: to push the film's release back from August 2014 to February 2015 ... and then from February all the way to September of next year. We're guessing they'll just keep pushing it until the universe loops over and the movie ends up coming out in the actual Wild West.

1

God Hates Terry Gilliam and His Don Quixote Film

Terry Gilliam has been trying to get his vision of Don Quixote off the ground for damn near 20 years, but someone's been working just as hard to stop him: the universe. Filming for the movie, which would have featured a modern-day man (Johnny Depp) being sent back in time and mistaken by Quixote for Sancho Panza, began in 1999 and immediately went to shit when they realized the dialogue was drowned out by the planes from a nearby military base. OK, that's fixable in post-production. The flash flood that destroyed the set the very next day would be a little more challenging, though.

Francois Duhamel
"We'll resume filming once those clouds spelling 'FUCK YOU TG' dissipate."

Still, Gilliam wasn't forced to admit that God is personally offended by his movie until Don Quixote himself, Jean Rochefort, was incapacitated by a herniated disc and unable to continue filming. The resulting insurance claim -- one of the most expensive in film history -- tied up the rights to the film for about 10 years. In the meantime, Gilliam started shooting another movie with Heath Ledger ... which, as you may have heard, didn't go so well.

Sony Pictures Classics
"You try going from The Joker to these jokers and see how that shit turns out."

Even then, Gilliam still hadn't learned his lesson -- as soon as the Don Quixote rights were released, he laughed in the face of fate and paid for it with a series of false starts, as every reworking of the project lingered in cinematic limbo. By now, in its amazing seventh incarnation, some compromises have been made: instead of Depp, the movie now stars some kid who was in 300 2, and rather than the fantastical time-traveling adventure of Gilliam's dreams, he's settled for mere air travel. The film now revolves around the protagonist's trip to Spain to find the village where a film within the film was filmed.

How long until Gilliam gives up and just does this movie with cardboard cutouts, Monty Python-style?

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And while we're on the topic, check out 6 Upcoming Movies That Are Completely Doomed for such films as the no-budget Jem reboot.