10 Recent Movies That Made INSANE Choices
9. Robbie Williams Is A Chimp - Better Man
To be a fly on the wall when filmmaker Michael Gracey pitched a biopic of Robbie Williams which saw the pop music legend portrayed by a digital chimpanzee.
Given that generic biopics of beloved musicians are an easy sell to audiences in the conservative current cinema landscape, it's completely unhinged to ignore the most obvious, commercial path forward and instead spend $110 million on one of the most peculiar biopics of all time.
But to be clear, Better Man was also quite brilliant - a gamble that absolutely paid off artistically, even if it was unsurprisingly a box office flop due to both its bonkers execution and Williams' general obscurity outside of Europe.
The whole chimp concept, which could so easily have been a mere attention-seeking gimmick, actually works shockingly well in underlining Williams' anxieties as both a performer and a human being.
It's just totally insane that anyone, anywhere greenlit the idea with the apparent confidence that it could possibly turn a profit.
Time will be kind to Better Man as more audiences discover it on streaming, but from a business perspective its existence is a complete head-scratcher.