7) Gigli
Production Budget: $75.6 million
Worldwide Box Office Total: $7,266,209
You know the expression, “You’ll never work in this town again?” Meet Martin Brest. He was never especially prolific, but he did make Beverly Hills Cop, and secured Al Pacino an Oscar with Scent of a Woman. Sure, he tripped up a little with Meet Joe Black, an overblown, overly dramatic, and overly wrought take on the classic Death Takes a Holiday, but that’s why pencils have erasers. And there was no bigger eraser than Gigli because nothing in Brest’s filmography can surpass it for name cache, and Brest hasn’t made another film since its release.
But the career of Martin Brest isn’t the only thing that Gigli destroyed in its path. There was once this thing called “Bennifer,” the seemingly impossible collision of high-wattage stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Which came first, their contribution to Gigli or their Hollywood romance is a chicken-and-egg question lost in time to the fact that once, it did exist, and for a while it was a bigger gossip black hole than the Kardashian baby and the Jodi Arias trial combined. Backlash was inevitable, but it could have been mitigated if only the movie itself had been able to hold any sort of structural integrity.
A consistent string of re-shoots and re-edits were being demanded by the studio, while director Brest and the producers were engaged in this tug of war to decide the fate of the film regarding what tinkering was required and when it would be ready for release. The still burgeoning internet film culture smelled blood in the water and never missed an opportunity to call Gigli dead on arrival even before the movie was scheduled to arrive. When it did open in August 2003, critics awarded the film with a 7 per cent collective “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a presumptive spot on the “Worst Films of the Year” list, and about $7 million in receipts from the worldwide box office.
Affleck has since recovered to become the toast of Tinsletown with a successful directing career, and J Lo. marches on as a multi-hyphenate, but poor Martin Brest has apparently lost all will to direct. Although, who would front the director of Gigli any kind of budget for a movie now?
