9) The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
Production Budget: $76 million
Worldwide Box Office Total: $35,143,820
Third time’s the charm, right? That must have been the thought when The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle came out in the summer of 2000, being the third movie based on a Jay Ward cartoon to come out in four years. Although George of the Jungle was a modest hit, Dudley Do-Right had a kind of “blink and you’ll miss it” status at the local multiplex. In Rocky and Bullwinkle’s favour was more name cache and the improbable, yet curious, involvement of acting titan Robert De Niro, but the end result, despite a mixed critical reaction, was more Dudley than George.
The conceit was perhaps a little too meta for its own good, and this was before “meta” was even a thing, which probably lead to more viewer confusion. The premise was that eternal bad guys Boris and Natasha (Jason Alexander and Rene Russo) as well as their boss, Fearless Leader (De Niro) leave their 2D animated world and enter ours in order to use cable television to brainwash the American public. The government and very special FBI agent Karen Sympathy (Piper Perabo) then recruit Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose to stop the bad guys, also bringing them to the real world along with the old series’ unseen narrator who remains unseen. A series of mad cap misadventures follow in what comes across as a loosely connected series of Rocky & Bullwinkle vignettes, like a bunch of the old cartoons were repurposed and tied together with the brainwashing plot.
Still, the script was probably not the weak link, and indeed on the surface showed some degree of inventiveness and ingenuity. Kenneth Lonergan gets sole screenplay credit, but 2000 treated him better for his award-nominated drama You Can Count On Me, which he also directed. But Broadway director Des McAnuff definitely seemed in over his head, and the live-action characters played by Alexander, Russo, and De Niro looked silly when realized in real life. For De Niro, who also served as the film’s producer, it was the initial sign of a nearly decade long tale spiral that saw the actor squander his talent more often than realize it (and the ridiculous self-parody of his famous Taxi Driver “Are you talking to me?” scene didn’t help either). The public though was just as unconvinced, and the movie made back less than half its budget with a worldwide box office haul of $35 million. There have been no movies made based on Jay Ward cartoons since.
