Face it, George Clooney sucks
By Kyle Smith
May 27, 2015 | 11:41pm
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With his underperforming film “Tomorrowland,” George Clooney has once again taken a hit at the box office.Photo: NY Post photo composite
It’s time for Hollywood to face facts: George Clooney is not a star.
If you matched them up head-to-head, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson would crush him — and I don’t just mean literally.
Clooney’s latest is the gargantuan flop “Tomorrowland” — a $190 million bomb (not including $100 million or so in worldwide marketing costs) that looks like it’s going to gross a little more than half of that at the North American box office.
It’s delicately being referred to as an underperformer because no one in Hollywood wants to hurt the fragile petals of Clooney’s feelings.
The failure of this supposed tentpole release is yet another sign that Clooney, who has been headlining movies for 19 years, just doesn’t sell tickets. If his movies took in a dollar’s profit for every magazine cover and breathless infotainment tidbit on him, they’d earn more money than they actually do at the box office.
Stars like Johnson get fans excited enough to actually go to the movies. Clooney doesn’t.
One role for which he was perfect — Danny Ocean — has created a lot of value for movie studios. Apart from the three “Ocean’s” movies, the only other time he ever toplined a major hit was “The Perfect Storm” in 2000 — a movie whose star was a wave. Clooney wasn’t pictured on the poster of that one and barely featured in the ads.
Except in those four films, audience interest has been sparse.
From “One Fine Day” (1996) to “Batman & Robin” (1997) to “Solaris” (2002) to “Intolerable Cruelty” (2003) to “The Good German” (2006) to “Leatherheads” (2008) to “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (2009) to “The Ides of March” (2011) to “The Monuments Men” (2014), if Clooney was the main attraction, the movie was somewhere between a disappointment and a flop.
A couple of his Oscar-bait movies, “Up in the Air” and “The Descendants,” maybe broke even. It’s hard to say. Running a simultaneous Oscar campaign and general publicity campaign is so expensive that it might have eaten up most or all of the apparent profit on these seemingly modestly budgeted films.
Of his 25 starring movies, four made a significant amount of money — that’s a .160 batting average.
That ain’t cleanup hitter. That isn’t even big-league. If Clooney were a shortstop, his only prayer of staying on the team would be if he were the owner’s son.
Of Clooney’s 25 starring movies, four made a significant amount of money — that’s a .160 batting average. that ain’t a cleanup hitter. that isn’t even big-League.
It’s not like Hollywood lacks for stars, defined as “people who actually sell tickets.” Again, look at Johnson: His notorious flop “Hercules,” from last year, still managed to gross $73 million in North America, $243 worldwide.
That’s better than any of Clooney’s movies has done since “Ocean’s Thirteen” eight years ago.
Johnson’s “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” didn’t land him on the cover of GQ — but so what? It banked $335 million worldwide. Clooney has only starred in two movies that did better than that in his entire career (the first two “Ocean’s” films).
By contrast, Johnson’s three “Fast and Furious” films are by far the three highest-grossing entries in that seven-film series. Hell, even Johnson’s dumb “Tooth Fairy” movie did better than most of Clooney’s.
If the success of “Gravity,” which grossed more than Clooney’s five preceding live-action star vehicles combined, is any indication, any producer hiring the actor for his movie would be best advised to kill him off in the first 20 minutes. (Sandra Bullock, on the other hand, has top-lined four hugely profitable films in just the past six years.)
Clooney isn’t “America’s Leading Man” (Vanity Fair, in 2006, breathlessly promoting his flop “The Good German”) or “The Last Movie Star” (Time magazine, 2008, breathlessly promoting his flop “Michael Clayton”).
Clooney isn’t even a movie star. He’s just a guy who keeps getting highly paid to make movies nobody wants to see.
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