What Happened to Movie 43?
How did the biggest movie with the biggest names manage to be the biggest failure? And why do I love it so much?
At some point during the winter of 2014, my ex-boyfriend and I were high. This tends to happen a lot when you're dating a stoner and are something of one yourself, and we'd found ourselves in this situation yet again after our undergrad classes were finished for the day. We both lived in the Philadelphia suburbs and went to a commuter branch campus of Penn State University, where we’d met. We’d first bonded over our shared sense of humor, finding joy in sketches from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and the hilarity of the perverted 4chan video “Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life.” That day, we were hanging out on his bed in his parents' suburban townhome with his two tabby cats and nothing to do, and had come to that part in our time being stoned together where we needed to decide on a movie to watch. “Why not the Citizen Kane of bad movies?” we figured. The film in question was streaming and we had to pay for it (though I do recall the cost going to his parents’ credit card). So, we agreed to take the plunge. How bad could it really be? We were high, of course, and we wanted to watch something ridiculous. Something that hopefully, at the very best, we could even laugh at.
This is the warm memory I typically try relating to people when asked why it is that I love Movie 43, indeed referred to as “the Citizen Kane of awful,” a film that took top prize at the Razzies in 2013 and maintains a dismal 4% on Rotten Tomatoes—a film that I have nonetheless voluntarily seen five times since that very first time I watched it. I always think back to those first moments sitting on my ex-boyfriend’s bed after we’d finished the film and, full of wonder, excitement, euphoria, and THC, realized that we'd been missing out on one of the funniest movies either of us had ever seen. A bona fide hidden gem that we'd cried laughing at nearly all the way through. How were more people not aware of this? How did the fruits of this film manage to elude audiences all this time? We felt like we’d stumbled upon a secret that demanded to be shared. But then we had a thought: was it just because we were high? Was it really that funny? Upon screening it for some friends a few days later, sober as we could possibly be, we found the latter to be true—all four of us were laughing.
Movie 43 has become a pariah of the film world, but it wasn’t intended to be. It was a single movie packed to the gills with the biggest names in Hollywood, with A-listers including Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, and Halle Berry. From an audience standpoint, it couldn’t have been hotter. I remember watching the trailers when I was eighteen and thinking that it looked incredible. It appeared to be set up like something of a farcical comedy version of those Garry Marshall ensemble holiday films, like Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve. I’m certain that that’s what most others thought, too. It also starred comedy names that I loved at the time, like Chris Pratt, Jason Sudeikis, Seth MacFarlane, and this fusion of comedic and serious actors stuffed into one gleefully ridiculous-looking concoction couldn’t have been more my speed. Suffice to say, it had greatly piqued the interest of myself and a friend during my senior year of high school. However, once the reviews began to roll in, we decided that we’d better not.
And then Movie 43 descended into both anonymity and infamy. It was a dirty little secret that Hollywood would rather forget about, and yet absolutely couldn’t. Forever a stain on the careers of names such as Liev Schreiber, Kieran Culkin, Uma Thurman, and Richard Gere. A low point in their filmographies, a reminder of how far they’d once deigned to stoop. It was an intriguing oddity and an abject embarrassment—something that needed to be pushed as far under the rug as it could go, but which continued to peek out from the corners. What was perceived as its unique failure and repugnant nature refused to allow it the dignity to be dissolved from the collective consciousness. The specter of Movie 43 still hangs ominously in our media memories because it seems to be a marker for the utter trash that the film industry still allows to be greenlit. But to begin to understand how and why Movie 43 failed, we have to travel back in time, over a decade before the finished film would end up stupefying audiences and critics everywhere.
***
“The studio is not hiding it,” insisted Movie 43 co-director and producer Peter Farrelly, dodging assertions that the film was being discarded in the days leading up to its January 25 release in 2013. (January has become something of a well-known dumping ground for movies perceived as doomed to fail.) The film’s dense, household-name cast was curiously absent from any interviews, in print or on television—save for the New York Post, where actor John Hodgman admitted to agreeing to film the segment he’s in while not knowing that he was filming a movie. The only thing close to real actor testimonials are a sparse amount of brief yet telling red carpet interviews from the film’s premiere. J.B. Smoove and Jay Ellis confess that they have no idea what the movie is supposed to be. Jimmy Bennett estimates that there are a total of 25 skits in the film, but isn’t really sure. Sean Williams Scott questions where one of the film’s stars, Halle Berry, is at the premiere, and jokes about being the only actor who showed up—to then be told that he’s actually the biggest actor to show up. “We knew [the film] would have to find its audience,” Farrelly had said, “and believe me, it will.”
It didn’t, as the story goes for Farrelly and long-time producing partner Charlie Wessler, who believed that teens and middle-aged stoners would show up for their film and save it from the abyss of critical and commercial failure where it soon wound up. Fifteen years prior, Wessler had begun his quest to make his own version of Kentucky Fried Movie—first with big names like the film’s own Zucker brothers, South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and Farrelly brothers Peter and Bob attached to co-direct, until Peter was the only director remaining from that initial collaboration. By all accounts, Movie 43 was a passion project; it was conceived lovingly by Wessler, who pitched it around for years to anyone in the industry who’d listen, willing to endure the patience that was ultimately required to make a movie like this happen. Once it found its footing, it ended up taking a painstaking four years to make because of all the big-name stars’ busy schedules. But Wessler and Farrelly didn’t mind the wait; they just wanted to see their film get made.
They viewed Movie 43 as “experimental,” and, well, it kind of is. It’s an anthology film that employs a range of humor from the absurd, to the low-brow, to the borderline offensive, made up of twelve detached comedy sketches. Some of these bits aren’t even sketches but randomly placed parody commercials, all acted out by some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Anthology films are not unheard of (see: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Trick ‘r’ Treat, XX, The ABCs of Death), but the uncouth nature of the film’s structure, subject matter, and sacrosanct star power made it something of a curiosity. The sketches are each directed by a different filmmaker and strung together by the loosely connecting thread of one overarching storyline, in which a hopeful, albeit erratic, screenwriter (Dennis Quaid) attempts to pitch a dubious movie executive (Greg Kinnear). The sketches are the screenwriter’s numerous and eventually rejected ideas. (In the United Kingdom, however, an alternate cut was released, where the uniting storyline instead follows three kids searching for the world’s most banned film). The film’s name, Movie 43, means nothing: Farrelly once overheard his son talking to friends about a movie which supposedly bore that title. When he discovered that it didn’t exist, he took it for his own.
If you look over the few articles detailing the timeline of the film’s production, it’s difficult to not sympathize at least a little bit, or admire what Wessler and Farrelly spent years trying to make happen—something far removed from the cynical, assembly-line production of affable studio superhero content troughs we’re force-fed year after year. Studios “couldn’t understand what [Wessler] was trying to do.” The bizarre sketch ideas and desired unconventional structure of the film drove the money men that Wessler pitched to head for the hills—until Relativity Media decided to take a chance, granting the film distribution and a measly $6 million budget that nonetheless worked out. How exactly were Relativity’s Ryan Kavanaugh and Tucker Tooley swayed? Hugh Jackman and his neck testicles.
The first official skit of the film—in which a woman (Kate Winslet) goes on a blind date with a successful hunk of a bachelor (Jackman), only to discover over dinner that he’s inexplicably afflicted with a pair of nuts attached to his neck—was the first sketch put together. Wessler had smoothly onboarded Jackman by pitching him at a wedding that they both attended. Jackman was, allegedly, hooked by the inane idea, and after going through the right channels (Jackman’s involvement probably helped), they also snagged Winslet. Both Winslet and Jackman are undeniably delightful in the segment, which is arguably the most recognizable and well-known of the film’s sketches. Neither of the Academy Award-nominated actors phones in their performances, and their comedic timing is impeccable; it’s objectively hilarious to watch Jackman act with a pair of prosthetic balls dangling from his gullet, which he does with the utmost grace.
But after successfully filming this first sketch, things became stickier. Wessler and Farrelly used the sketch to reel in more big names, but there was resistance. George Clooney turned down a sketch where the premise was that he fails at picking up women; Colin Farrell backed out after initially agreeing to play opposite Gerard Butler as a leprechaun in a sketch directed by Brett Ratner; Richard Gere shot all his scenes, but had seemed to make his filming availability intentionally elusive. In a 2018 Facebook Q&A, director James Gunn blamed long-time collaborator and fellow Movie 43 sketch director Elizabeth Banks for convincing him to come on, revealing that he not only didn’t edit his segment, but has never seen the finished film. Since its release eight years ago, it seems that no one involved has spoken a word of Movie 43 publicly save for Gunn. At the time, Farrelly could tell that people involved with the project were consistently hesitant to stay on: “They clearly wanted out! But we wouldn’t let them.” He explained that their strategy for recruiting their participants involved a mix of patience, workaround, plain old guilt-tripping, and getting friends to come aboard their sinking ship.
Still, despite the scale pay and scheduling conflicts, Wessler felt that the actors who did join in were mostly happy to because of the short filming time and chance to act outside of their comfort zones. Halle Berry fully commits herself to playing a woman intent on outperforming her date (Stephen Merchant); their ice-breaking attempt at playing Truth or Dare escalates to Berry sticking her boob in guacamole and undergoing an obscene breast enhancement. Terrence Howard is hilarious as a basketball coach in 1959, who becomes increasingly incensed at his all-Black team feeling intimidated by the all-white one they’re about to face. Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber give what are perhaps the film’s most brilliant performances, as a pair of homeschooling parents intent on giving their son (Jeremy Allen White) the “real high school experience” by roleplaying as his peers. The energy Watts in particular brings to this role feels like a precursor to her equal parts comedic and towering portrayal as the intimidating, inimitable Janey-E on Twin Peaks: The Return. And, in a way, production on Movie 43 was similar to David Lynch’s 2017 limited series: stars didn’t know about the finished product beyond the scenes they were filming. “They were attracted to their script,” Wessler said, “and as long as that tickled their funnybone, that was enough.”
***
By its release date, Movie 43 wasn’t expected to perform overly well at the box office. The studio anticipated an $8-9 million opening weekend take-in, but garnered only $1.8 million on Friday night. There had been no promotion from either Relativity or the cast, save for a red band trailer that had dropped in October 2012, and the film wasn’t screened in advance for critics. At the end of its opening weekend, Movie 43 had only made $4.8 million; by the close of its theatrical run in mid-March, it had made $8.8 million domestically. Still, combined with international box office, Relativity Media’s international pre-sales deals, and a deal made with Netflix, its modest $6 million budget was more than covered. It wasn’t a financial flop, but the combined dismal critical and audience reception dealt the death blow to the film’s legacy. The reviews are not only sweepingly negative but quite withering. Francesca Steele for The Independent described the film as “utterly devoid of laughs;” Peter Bradshaw called it “cynical and tired;” the Los Angeles Times’ Sheri Linden dubbed it “a star-studded piece of aggressive stupidity.” And, perhaps my favorite, a 2016 retrospective of the film for the AV Club saw Nathan Rabin write that Movie 43 is “such an insult to everyone and everything that the truest way to honor its cast’s pointless sacrifices is to avoid it.”
The case of Movie 43’s across-the-board failure is both understandable and strange. The humor employed in the film might not be to everyone’s taste—typically, that is a given when it comes to humor—but it does have an audience. The acclaimed actors fully give themselves over to their performances. The people behind the film were, quite plainly, taking risks, something which is now akin to a white whale in our aforementioned age of IP slop. I’m not here to defend Movie 43 as auteur cinema—it is quite an ugly-looking movie, not every sketch works, and there are jokes that do not hold up—but it’s interesting that in this particular case of studio resistance to offbeat ideas, neither audiences nor critics were willing to go to bat for it. By the time of its release, there was an overabundance of critical stigma attached to the film, and my guess is that the people who did go out on a limb and buy a ticket ended up put off by both its alienating story approach and exceedingly gross-out humor. Entertainment Weekly senior editor Thom Geier had been of the opinion that the content was already too dated—“gross-out for gross-out’s sake”—and added that the sketches in the film might have been better served if simply given over to Funny or Die. It’s true that I’ve had discussions with even detractors of the film who agree that some of the sketches are not just good, but very funny. As a film, however, the finished product is garish and off-putting. Would the bits have succeeded individually on a platform like Funny or Die? Or conceived for a sketch show like SNL?
Perhaps, but Farrelly and Wessler didn’t want their sketches on Funny or Die. “With Funny or Die, there are certain limits,” Farrelly explained. “And we just wanted to do that kind of short and go much further than that.” Thus, despite the through line of Dennis Quaid’s failed screenwriter attempting to pitch these sketches as his film ideas, Movie 43 itself has an absence of any emotional anchor—something present in the goofiness of Judd Apatow films or the Farrellys’ own There’s Something About Mary. But, in some instances, emotional cores can mar the potential for full-throttled and gleeful absurdity, as with the insistence on schmaltzy sentimentality in Adam Sandler’s otherwise ridiculous and often surreal comedies. If Geier agreed that the sketches could’ve found a home at Funny or Die, the fact remains that Movie 43 has an audience. Personally speaking, I mostly want the comedy film I’m watching to make me laugh.
These days, I like to refer to myself as a “one-woman Movie 43 fan club,” and I mean it. But I don’t say that I like Movie 43 to necessarily stand out from the crowd or be contrarian, nor to rile people up one way or the other— even though it’s fun to know, and really feel like you know for a fact, that you’re one of only a few people out there who loves something. So, I say it because I do love it, and I continue to say it in the hopes that someone else out there might watch it and love it, too. Maybe my shining endorsement can propel the film in front of someone who will simply find it funny, even if it never reaches the prestige of cult status. Over the years, I’ve screened Movie 43 to friends who share my sense of humor and who laugh from start to finish, while coming away similarly mystified as to why it’s continued to remain so acutely loathed. Farrelly and Wessler themselves screened Hugh Jackman’s sketch at a talk they gave at Harvard University sometime before the film’s release to alleged uproar. And, if you ask me, Movie 43 has never been granted a reevaluation of any kind, and never will be, because it’s entirely and near-inseparably mired by stigma. Hatred of the film has become so woven into its lore that watching the film and knowing that it’s bad go hand-in-hand. It’s part of the experience. People who might otherwise enjoy Movie 43 will go into it ready to dislike it. You can’t laugh with a film that you’ve been told to laugh at. Still, it doesn’t even receive credit for how widely it’s maligned. I’d much prefer that a film offend my personal aesthetics than sate me with the gruelingly adequate.
In the end, Movie 43’s enduring legacy is that Hugh Jackman wore a pair of prosthetic testicles on his neck, and that it’s the Citizen Kane of bad movies; one could say that there are worse ways to go. Despite being the film’s only known cheerleader, I oscillate back and forth about whether I feel Movie 43 is truly “bad” or “good.” On the one hand, the film decidedly does it’s job at making me laugh through approximately 80-90% of it, and when it comes to comedy films I prize laughter above almost all else. On the other, it’s a genuinely grotesque, clunky thing, perhaps the least accessible and most isolating approach to anthology filmmaking one could possibly take. And, on the third hand, it doesn’t really matter whether I think it’s bad or good. I like the film. I’m not using this essay to finally espouse my long-gestating case for Movie 43 as a secret work of genius, because that’s not what I actually think of it. Part of me does feel that it’s been unfairly smeared compared to other films of a similarly low-brow, distasteful nature, but another part of me thinks it’s fantastic that a film could cause such overwhelming repulsion at all.
I sit through festival films, indies, and blockbusters alike and can’t tell you how many times I slink out of a theater with the pictures I just bore witness to already fading from memory. I’ve grown to loathe films that are just okay. I can’t think of anything worse than to come away from art feeling neither challenged nor particularly gratified. I want a film to overwhelm my senses, be it for better or for worse. I want to feel pulsating abhorrence or staggering ardor. I want to clench my fists or feel my eyes redden and swell or heave laughter until I fear that I might collapse. We’ve grown complacent to that which keeps us fed and contented. We’ve grown to ask not more from this output of “content,” but more of the same, in which case: maybe it’s better for Movie 43 to have been hated as it was. Movie 43 refuses to die. Whether it’s a punchline or a horror story, a half-remembered fever dream or an inclusion on a listicle of cinematic failures—maybe Movie 43 was an awful thing. Well, good. We should want more ugly art that makes us angry.
And yet, all the same, when the near-universal opinion is to hate something, who wants to be the person to say that they love it? Clearly, they must have bad taste. *
I bought a copy last week. It stands up. Like "Shakes the Clown," this project was destined to a small, devoted audience.