The rise and fall of Robert Zemeckis: how did the ‘Back to the Future’ director become a magnet for disaster in Hollywood?

In art in general, and in cinema in particular, an obsession can be the first stepping stone to a glorious career or a recipe for disaster. Something of which we have the best example in the recent career of Robert Zemeckis: Since the turn of the century, the director of Return to the future Y Forrest Gump he has gone from being a Hollywood titan to living under the perpetual shadow of critical and box-office catastrophe.

The reception to his remake of Pinocchio in the venice festival confirms that Zemeckis is not on the mend, let’s say. With a meager 40% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has drawn invective such as “barely looks like a real movie” (IndieWire) either “it will destroy the fans and disappoint the rest” (ComicBookMovie). not even the presence of Tom Hanks What Geppetto has attracted the indulgence of pens.

How could this have happened? The easiest explanation is that Zemeckis’s passion for digital imaging has been his undoing. If we look for a date for the beginning of said decline, we can put it at the beginning of the 21st century: Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007), two feature films made using motion capture, represented as many potholes in the career of an author who had brilliantly solved a pirouette of the stature of Castaway (2000).

What the truth hides, a somewhat crude thriller also released in 2000, had proven that Zemeckis was not infallible. But, until then, even its less critical moments were enjoyable: when the director was in a good mood, he gave you Who cheated on roger rabbit?, and when their bets did not come out, the result was a film as vindicatable in the era of influencers as Death suits you good. As the classic said, “there they give us all”.

Still, Zemeckis’s love of the digital image seemed to have borne fruit in his adaptation of a christmas tale (2009). Despite receiving mixed reviews, this version of the story of Charles Dickens with Jim Carrey Y Gary Oldman it did well at the box office: anyone would have thought that its author’s nadir was just around the corner.

The nadir in question attends for Mars needs mothers, and it did not carry the signature of Zemeckis, but that of the animation artist Simon Wells. But the director of Forrest Gump produced the film for Disney through your company Digital ImageMovers: when the box office data turned out to be apocalyptic, he was singled out as ultimately responsible.

The word “apocalyptic” does not have to be a hyperbole if we remember that Mars needs mothers cost $150 million and raised only 39, guaranteeing the film a spot on the list of greatest box office bombs of history

On the eve of said cataclysm, and surely smelling what was coming, Disney had ended its collaboration with ImageMovers Digital. The move resulted in the cancellation of numerous projects (including a sequel to Who cheated on roger rabbit?) and in the dismissal of 450 workers.

Such a punch caused Zemeckis’s return to directing in live action with The flight (2015), a drama with Denzel Washington in the role of a drug addict pilot who seemed to return the waters to their course. For now, the film was nominated for two Oscars, one for the actor and one for the screenwriter. John Gattins.

The challenge (2015) was another medium budget film where Joseph Gordon-Levitt embodied Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who crossed a wire stretched between the Twin Towers. The reception for this work was respectful, if not enthusiastic, and hinted that Zemeckis did not have long to come out of purgatory.

Indeed, the filmmaker did not have much left to change his place, but his destiny was going to be, once again, hell. After the mediocre war drama allies (2016, with Brad Pitt Y Marion Cotillard), Zemeckis took a big plunge with Welcome to Marwen.

Based on a real case, and again combining digital animation with real images, this film seemed to have been born with ‘Oscar-hunting’ ambitions for Steve Carell, its leading actor. But his results consolidated the fame of his director’s jinx: $13 million at the box office on a $50 budget and a bloodless 34% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

The following example of bad luck zemeckisian it was Roald Dahl’s Witches (2020). In this case, to the usual bad reviews (which emphasized the superiority of the previous adaptation signed by Nicholas Rog) It must be added that the film was among the titles overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic. Finally, the film was released in hbomax, reaching the big screen only in those countries that did not have said VOD service.

Having seen the first results of Pinocchio, it is highly unlikely that this adaptation of the fairy tale Carlo Collodi help the director to relaunch his career. It remains to be seen whether the appeal of the Disney brand, in addition to the cast of Tom Hanks or Cynthia Erivo (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lorraine Braco remain in the voice cast in VO), help the film to do well at the box office.

Still, Zemeckis has two other projects in the pipeline: Here, a return to digital experiments with Hanks and RobinWright, Y king, historical film set in Hawaii and starring Dwayne Johnson. It is clear that, as bad as it goes, the director does not plan to stop showing himself unattainable to discouragement.

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The rise and fall of Robert Zemeckis: how did the ‘Back to the Future’ director become a magnet for disaster in Hollywood?