What the *beep* happened to Kim Basinger's career?
-
soundwave5 — 9 years ago(May 27, 2016 08:52 AM)
How many actresses really have strong careers into their 40s?
Even Julia Roberts, who's pretty much the biggest female star of the last 30-40 years has had no huge hits after turning 40.
Basinger was already well into her 30s when she got the Batman gig, and while she was red hot for a time there, Batman never developed into a franchised thing for her because her character was not in the sequel to make room for Michelle Pfefier's Catwoman.
And yeah she made some bad career choices, but it's not like she ever was some huge mainstream type actress before, she was mostly known for the sex appeal in 9 1/2 Weeks and as a Bond girl. -
TMC-4 — 9 years ago(September 10, 2016 11:00 PM)
I've always heard that Kim Basinger was initially going to be in
Returns
. In the earlier script from Sam Hamm (before Tim Burton brought in Daniel Waters and Wesley Strick), Bruce Wayne even proposes to Vicki Vale. I felt that something like that was one of the big missed opportunities in the old Batman series. It seemed like Tim Burton was too wrapped up in making
Returns
"its own thing" (and closer to his aesthetic/personal tastes than in the 1989 movie) at the expense of further developing Bruce Wayne's character.
https://lebeauleblog.com/2014/12/08/what-might-have-been-kim-basinger/11/ -
TMC-4 — 9 years ago(August 22, 2016 11:44 PM)
While we're at it, why do Kim Basinger's other movies (besides stuff like
LA Confidential
and
8 Mile
) normally bomb at the box office:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/BoxOfficeBomb/NumbersThroughH
Bless the Child (2000) Budget, $65 million. Box office, $40,443,010. Writer Tom Rickman was cursed with only writing TV movies after this (one of which was The Reagans, which was released months before Ronald Reagan's passing.)
Cool World (1992) Budget, $28 million. Box office, $14,110,589. Director Ralph Bakshi was so dismayed by the film's reception and Executive Meddling (which included star Kim Basinger bowdlerizing the movie to show for sick hospital children even though that was not the intention of Bakshi at all) that he eventually retired from filmmaking. Cool World was also one of a few flops in the early 90's that melted the A-list career of Basinger, and film helmer Frank Mancuso's career was downgraded to B-level status ever since.
Final Analysis (1992) Budget, $33 million. Box office, $28,590,665. One of a few flops in the early 90's that melted the A-list career of Kim Basinger.
Grudge Match (2013) Budget, $40 million. Box office, $29,807,260 (domestic), $44,907,260 (worldwide).
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/BoxOfficeBomb/IThroughR
The Marrying Man (1991) Budget, $26 million. Box office, $12,454,758. Dashed Kim Basinger's hopes of being a singer, and one of a few flops in the early 90's that melted her A-list career.
My Stepmother Is An Alien (1988) Budget, $26 million. Box office, $13,854,000 (domestic). One of a handful of 1988/1989 films that caused the Weintraub Entertainment Group to implode right out of the gates, and one of the movies that ended Coca-Cola's control over Columbia and caused their merger with Tristar and Sony.
The Nice Guys (2016) Budget, $50 million. Box office, $33,364,096 (domestic), $50,364,096 (worldwide). Despite glowing reviews from critics, this was released in the midst of one of the ugliest box office summers in cinema history, and could not make up the budget as a result despite almost all of the big-budget competition getting worse reviews than Nice Guys got.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/BoxOfficeBomb/SThroughZ
Waynes World 2 (1993) Budget, $40 million. Box office, $48.2 million (domestic). While this take on Wayne and Garth had a budget that was double that of the original sleeper classic, it was not considered as fresh as the original, and it didn't have the same director because she had fallen out with star Mike Myers over the difficulty of working with him (she directed The Beverly Hillbillies instead, which was a financial success but was actually disdained by critics). Paramount and NBC let the Wayne's World sketch lie in the culture nostalgia corner after this film, but this would be one of the last times an SNL-based film would be taken seriously before it started getting derailed with It's Pat! the next year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_box_office_bombs -
TMC-4 — 9 years ago(January 29, 2017 09:10 PM)
I think that in that regard, it has more to do w/ Kim Basinger arguably at the end of the day, not being charismatic enough or being an actress who can display a significant amount of range. She pretty much eventually reached a point in which she simply couldn't rely primarily on her looks anymore and therefore, she had little else to fall back on.