It’s easy to forget that all careers are fragile. Sure, tenured professors can do pretty much whatever they want and union workers always got each other’s backs, but the most secure careers can crumble. Even celebrities aren’t safe. Hollywood is a competitive industry, and often times, even the most celebrated and seasoned actors make a career move that ends up with a poor film, and their acting careers are often dealt a serious blow in the process.
For proof of that last fact, take a look at our favorite career-ruining movies below.
- Cuba Gooding Jr., Boat Trip (2002): This might take the cake. In a 2006 interview with New York Times, Gooding fessed up to the dud, saying, “I thought people wanted me to make them laugh. But I was wrong on so many levels. I try to take all my energy and bravado and take it into comedy, and that’s when I’m terrible. And it was also for the money. When I got to Boat Trip, I thought it was time to do something that was going to make me a $20 million player.” Ouch.
- Shaquille O’Neal, Kazaam (1996): When you think of Shaq, you probably don’t think “movie star.” But Shaq gave it his all in 1996 with the corny-as-hell genie movie Kazaam. It’s horrible: the seven-foot then-NBA star is a 5,000 year-old genie named Kazaam who’s imprisoned doling out wishes. On second thought, Kazaam is kinda a national treasure, but it definitely didn’t help Shaq land more movie deals.
- Mike Myers, The Love Guru (2008): Alright, so Mike Myers wasn’t exactly a critic’s darling at any point in his career, but The Love Guru sunk his ship of shtick so low that Myers has never really returned, except in animated form as Shrek.
- Halle Berry, Catwoman (2004): So Catwoman didn’t ruin Halle Berry’s career, but it’s probably one of the most expensive bad movies ever. It was bad enough, in fact, to earn Berry her first career Razzie, an award for awful acting. “First of all I wanna thank Warner Brothers,” she said when she accepted the award in person. “Thank you for putting me in a piece-of-shit-God-awful movie.” Later in the speech Berry dragged out her manager onto the stage and joked, “Next time, maybe you should read the script.” (Seriously, the whole speech is better than the movie.)
- Kevin Costner, Waterworld (1995): Say what you will about Waterworld, I think it’s a masterpiece full of inventive story-telling and solid characters, but the world doesn’t agree, and Kevin Costner hasn’t regained his star power ever since.
- Mariah Carey, Glitter (2001): Mariah Carey is everlasting, but Glitter almost took her out. A couple years ago she remembered the movie as a “kitsch moment in the history of my life,” a pretty on-point assessment more than a decade after the fact.
- Hayden Christensen, Star Wars Episode III: Attack of the Clones (2002): Remember Hayden Christensen? Before Star Wars he was doing pretty well for himself. Nowadays, after ruining the series for a lot of fans, Christensen is living on a farm in Ontario. Granted, it’s probably a really nice, fancy farm, but still….
- Elizabeth Berkley, Showgirls (1995): The beloved Saved by the Bell actresses’ star power had already faded by the mid-1990s, but Showgirls, an excessively over-budget flop, sealed the deal.
- Lindsay Lohan, I Know Who Killed Me (2007): Who told Lindsay Lohan she needed a second movie in which she plays a pair of twins on her resume?
- Eddie Murphy, Pluto Nash (2002): Eddie Murphy has been in enough bad movies to ruin a dozen actor’s careers, but it was 2002’s Pluto Nash that confirmed the worst for the once top-of-the-charts comedian.