10 Unspeakably Awful Films Made By Oscar Winners

Pinocchio, unfortunately, is a famous disaster and arguably what killed Roberto Benigni's chances at a major international career. But let's back up. It's 1999, and Roberto Benigni has just won Best Actor for his performance in Life is Beautiful, which is a heartbreaking film set during the Holocaust, where a father uses his imagination to help distract his young son from the horrors around him.

He wasn't particularly a known entity in Hollywood, and this seemed like it was going to serve as a launching pad for him into high profile global cinema.

But what would his follow up project be? Well, he chose to write and direct an adaptation of Pinocchio, with himself (a fifty year old man at this point) in the eponymous role of Pinocchio. And there are so many things that went wrong it's hard to know where to begin.

First of it, it was clearly a shameless vanity project, and the dub into English was all over the place. It performed so badly at the box office that one critic went so far as to remark that, "Osama Bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden." Ouch.