10 Great Actors Who Keep Appearing In TERRIBLE Movies
Talent can only take you so far.
The career of an actor is a scary and unpredictable one: the overwhelming majority of performers aren't lucky enough for it to be their sole occupation, and even for those who "make it," getting paid doesn't guarantee artistic satisfaction.
The factors which go into delivering a critically and commercially successful film are extremely complex, and so even the most respected A-list name actors can find themselves trapped in projects which just don't deliver the goods.
A single dud movie is one thing, but sometimes actors get caught in an unfortunate loop of terrible films, whether a result of bad luck, a poor agent, or their own craven desire to scoop up as many paychecks as possible.
While for some of these actors it's just a matter of time before their career rebounds with a quality project, for others it seems like they're contended to collect easy paydays for the rest of their career, wasting their immense, often Oscar-nominated talents in the process.
These killer actors desperately need a great movie to redeem their dispiriting streak of awful recent releases...
10. Gary Oldman
Gary Oldman is one of the greatest and arguably most underappreciated actors of his generation, such that his 2018 Best Actor Oscar win for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour felt like a damn long time coming.
But Oldman's talents might well be undervalued because his output is so freakishly inconsistent, especially in more recent years. For every iconic banger movie role, there are typically a few duds Oldman clearly sleepwalked his way through for a payday.
Things truly fell off a cliff after he appeared in 2014's Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, though. Since then, Oldman has appeared in a dozen films, only a single one of which - Darkest Hour - was well received.
Though this dud streak started with theatrical stinkers like Child 44, Criminal, The Space Between Us, and Hunter Killer, in more recent years he's gingerly entered the straight-to-VOD dungeon, appearing in near-universally panned thrillers like Killers Anonymous, Mary, and The Courier, which have an average Rotten Tomatoes score of just 3.3%. Yikes.
At least with Oldman set to appear as Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in David Fincher's upcoming drama Mank, it's highly probable that another Oscar nomination is in Oldman's near-future.