A comedy that managed to bring together great Hollywood actors and actresses on the screen but whose result was an absolute failure.
Hell is full of good intentions. And it is that an apparently innovative idea that manages to bring together a good handful of Hollywood stars under the same purpose is not necessarily going to translate into success. The history of cinema has left us with everything: from masterpieces that were meant to be, to unexpected failures after disbursing millions of dollars or the brutal success of a title considered a priori B-series.
That good intentions are not enough is demonstrated, among many others, by Movie 43an ineffable film that tIt took more than 10 years to become a reality and when it did, it managed to attract a lot of attention with its proposal. Produced by a Charles B. Wessler absolutely convinced of what he had in hand, the tape was set out from the beginning as an anthological comedy composed, nothing more and nothing less, than 14 different stories.
Each of these stories was directed by a different filmmaker and among their ranks we found some popular names, starting with Peter Farrelly, but also with Marvel genius and now DC master James Gunn or charismatic actor Bob Odenkirk on board. Similarly, each of the stories featured a different cast of actors, and as a result, the film ended up bringing together an enormous amount of talent.l: Kate Winslet, Emma Stone, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Gerard Butler, Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Chloë Grace Moretz, Chris Pratt, Uma Thurman, Naomi Watts and many more.
The approach was as follows: 14 fun stories in the form of ‘sketches’ interconnected with each other and with a common plot. The story of a teenager and his brother in their attempt to find a film that is banned and censored all over the world on the Internet. Guess the name? Indeed. movie 43.
Curiously, the time it took Movie 43 receiving the green light could easily have served as a warning of what was to come. The main problem why the film took almost a decade to get off the ground was that most studios had rejected the script, which was eventually acquired by Relativity Media for $6 million. But receiving the support of a production company was not the only step the film had to go through, but also its shooting, since organizing the schedules of so many actors made production a real challenge. Along the way, the project lost some of the people involved and there were even actors who wanted to back down. “Most of the agents avoided me because they knew what I wanted to do”Wessler would tell The New York Post. “What agent wants to get their big client into a two-day session for $800 a day?”
The truth is that there are many friends in this film. And if they hadn’t said yes, it wouldn’t have been done.
Everything seemed to point to disaster with Movie 43 and, indeed, it would end up being. With such a low budget of 6 million dollars, it was not difficult for the film to reach the break-even point, but the reality is that much of the critics were absolutely horrified.
“He is the Citizen Kane of the gruesome”would get to write a columnist of Chicago Sun Times. And although harsh, this description is perhaps not the worst thing that was written in 2013 about the film, which it became from that precise moment in a regular of any top of the worst movies in history. If you still want to see it, you will find it in the Movistar+ catalogue.
