Recently, George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer, who both starred together in 1996’s One Fine Day, appeared together for Variety’s Actors on Actors, and during the chat Clooney told Pfeiffer, who herself was in Batman Returns from the same franchise, what he’d learned from being in such an expensive flop.
Clooney, who’s insisted for many years that his performance was also a big part of the movie’s failure, even going so far as to tell Ben Affleck not to play Batman when he was first offered the role in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, decided to go forward focusing on entire projects and not just his role in them.
“After Batman & Robin came out, and it was a big bomb – you learn from your failures; you don’t learn from successes,” he said. “So then I thought, I have to focus really on the script. It’s not just about my part; it’s about the whole movie. The next three films I did were Out of Sight, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Three Kings, which were really great screenplays. They didn’t all do very well financially, but they were all critically well received.”
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“It became clear to me that you can make a bad film out of a good script, but you can’t make a good film out of a bad script,” Clooney added. “I gravitate toward pieces that interest me. They don’t always end up working, because there are so many things that can go wrong, including me.”
You can read the IGN review of The Midnight Sky here, George Clooney’s latest film, which is available to stream on Netflix.
Meanwhile, Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which has had a turbulent production schedule this past year due to the pandemic, is now due out in 2022, as the movie industry continues adjusting its schedule. And in other DCEU Bat-news, Michael Keaton’s Batman is expected to make an appearance in The Flash movie, opposite Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen.
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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
