13 Hyped Movie Roles That Were Total Cop-Outs

What a waste Jared Leto's Joker was.

By Jack Pooley /

Warner Bros.

It goes without saying that a buzzed-about performance can make or break a movie: live up to the hype, for instance, and you've got instantly iconic, even potentially Oscar-winning glory.

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But fall short of the mark, and audiences will be left feeling dejected and unsatisfied en masse, wondering quite what the hell went wrong, and how so much promise was ultimately squandered.

You can certainly see that most of these actors were at least trying, but due to a confluence of circumstances - filmmaking being a collaborative art form and all - the end result just didn't come together as everyone hoped and expected.

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The lesson here? No matter how pitch-perfect an actor might seem for a given role, casting is ultimately just a small piece of the extremely intricate puzzle that is making movies...

13. Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) - Spectre

MGM

When Christoph Waltz was cast as the main villain in the most recent Bond film, fans were excited for two reasons: he proved his incredible aptitude at playing intimidating villains in Inglourious Basterds (a role for which he won an Oscar), and it was enormously likely that he would be playing legendary 007 baddie Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

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Despite the note-perfect casting, Waltz basically just ambles his way through the utterly pedestrian Bond film that is Spectre, spending a ludicrous amount of time off-screen - even for the standards of Blofeld - before ret-conning the entire Daniel Craig run of Bond in the third act by announcing that he was the grand puppeteer of everything all along.

Making matters worse is that with Bond 25 imminently set to start shooting and Waltz still not confirmed to appear, it's likely that his Blofeld will end up a wildly underwhelming one-off. Given the potential that still remains for Waltz to make the role his own, that's extremely disheartening.

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