Why did two-time Oscar winner and eternal critics’ darling Cate Blanchett, who must have a lot of good scripts hitting the doormat, decide to star in , a universally derided video-game adaptation about space outlaws? She has, in fact, put down to “Covid madness” in 2020, when she was cast. In an interview with Empire magazine, Blanchett explained, “I was spending a lot of time in the garden, using the chainsaw a little too freely. My husband said, ‘This film could save your life.
’” To practice, she got herself a PS5 and started playing the games, then got mired in a frazzling mess of a production needing multiple reshoots. This was all for a film which opened poorly, in line with industry expectations, then fell off abysmally in week two, qualifying it as a megabomb. Even lowest-common-denominator multiplex fare that makes money, , can be damaging to the culture, leaving cinema “in a bad way”, and diluting the careers of his acting colleagues.
Cox speaks from an enlightened position: he took a role in one of Marvel’s best films, X2 (2003), and then got out – which is more than can be said for , who appears in all four Thor movies and implies he’s somewhat wasted in them. “They put me in armour,” he told the New Yorker, “they shoved a beard on me. Sit on the throne, shout a bit.
If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.” There’s a level of slumming it that almost all film actors must tolerate once in a while, .