10 Unlikely Movie Team-Ups You Completely Forgot Happened
3. Shadowboxer - Cuba Gooding Jr/Helen Mirren
Few careers are more baffling than that of Cuba Gooding Jr, who went from the star making Boys N The Hood to the Oscar winning Jerry Maguire to Rat Race. The man has chops, but rarely uses them these days, and more to the point has a track record of picking strange projects.
Exhibit A: 2005’s Shadowboxer, in which he plays fellow Academy Award winner Helen Mirren’s stepson - and lover - in a bizarre and forgotten film about contract killers. Mirren mercifully sits out about half of the run time, but not before a particularly questionable scene.
Mirren, dying of cancer, has Gooding Jr shoot her in the head after one final tryst in the woods. Even for a career as strange as Gooding Jr’s, this stands out as weird. Mirren has no doubt put the experience long out of her mind.
Unsurprisingly, this film was not a success, clearing less than $1,000,000 at the box office. Despite featuring perennial Hollywood fascinations like assassins and incest (sort of), somethign about this particular combo simply didn’t connect with audiences - what a shock!