10 Movies That Ruined Perfect Casts With One Bad Choice
Great casts ruined by one bad apple.
There's nothing quite as frustrating as a movie that almost achieves perfection, but messes it all up at the final hurdle. Sometimes that's a fudged ending, bad editing or a single scene that ruins everything.
After developing a pitch-perfect script and securing the millions of dollars necessary to see most movies into fruition, it must hurt the film-makers too. Increasingly, it's the casting department they should turn their ire towards, because often, this is where so many movies fall by the wayside.
Certain actors, despite presumably impressing adequately enough at the audition stage, just aren’t right for certain roles and that’s made all the more obvious when the rest of a film cast are pretty much spot on in their own parts.
Whether it’s down to crass characterization, awkwardly bad accents or just a plain lack of acting skills, these woeful miscastings amongst otherwise perfect ensembles are living proof of the old saying ‘one bad apple spoils the whole barrel’.
10. Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves – Kevin Costner
Hot on the trail of successful films like Field of Dreams and the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner was quite the bankable star so it probably made perfect sense for director Kevin Reynolds to cast him in the title role of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
What doesn’t make sense though is that while Alan Rickman gives a delightfully hammy and BAFTA-winning performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham and Morgan Freeman is as wise as ever as Moorish sidekick Azeem, Costner, while playing one of England’s most famous folk heroes, doesn’t even seem to attempt anything resembling a passable British accent.
Befittingly, Costner was awarded a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actor for his Americanized take on Robin Hood but bad acting isn’t the film’s only legacy. It’s also responsible for inflicting Bryan Adam’s cheesy ballad (Everything I Do) I Do It for You – which spent an estimated 6,000 years at number one in the UK music charts – upon the world.
Thanks for that.