(02) Hollywood Star Coloring!

Unbreakable: 18 Film Stars Impervious To Box-Office Flops [Excerpt*]
By Nathan Rabin, Noel Murray, Scott Tobias
Steven Hyden, and Tasha Robinson

1. Bruce Willis

All hail the Teflon don of cinematic failure.

Over the course of his perhaps regrettably hyper-prolific career, Willis has appeared in some of the biggest, most notorious flops of the past few decades, golden turkeys like Sunset, Hudson Hawk, The Bonfire Of The Vanities, North, Breakfast Of Champions, The Story Of Us, and Perfect Stranger. Yet he remains one of Hollywood's biggest stars and most bankable names. It helps that Willis winks and smirks his way through many of his performances as a way of letting the audience know that he doesn't believe in the foolishness he's appearing in any more than they do.

2. George Clooney

Clooney became famous relatively late in life, on the strength of his smoldering, sensitive performance on the TV show ER, and by the time his face started getting splashed across the covers of Us and People, he'd developed a keen interest in not wanting to be embarrassed.

After the well-paying debacle of Batman and Robin, Clooney made an overt retreat from blockbusters, cozying up to sympathetic auteurs like Steven Soderbergh and the Coen brothers (and some not-so-sympathetic ones, like Three Kings director David O. Russell), while cultivating a reputation as Hollywood's Gentleman Superstar.

Television news pundits who oppose Clooney politically make a point of noting that his name rarely top-lines smash hits anymore, but that kind of windfall has rarely been the motivation for films like Solaris or Syriana, or Clooney's directorial efforts Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind and Good Night, And Good Luck.

Clooney's picture still shows up in magazines and on entertainment shows - Fox News included - but he's now a movie star who enjoys being well-known while not much caring whether his movies are.

3. Brad Pitt

Like pal George Clooney, Pitt favors challenging roles in off-kilter fare. Also as with Clooney, those quirky projects tend to flop miserably, as have pretty much all his films from the past decade that didn't have "Ocean" or "Mr. and Mrs." in their titles. The critically revered, audience-resistant The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is the latest and most dramatic example of Pitt's propensity for high-minded flops, though it's hard to understand how a film with a title like that could fail to draw in the masses.

Even Fight Club, Pitt's defining triumph, was a sizable commercial failure upon its theatrical release, as were the less-beloved Meet Joe Black, Spy Game, The Mexican, Seven Years In Tibet, The Devil's Own, Cool World, and Kalifornia. Yet Pitt retains his superstar status in no small part because he looks the part; he's still considered big even as the grosses for his pictures shrink.

5. John Travolta

Travolta's career has risen from the grave more times than a slasher-movie villain. By all rights, Travolta's post-Pulp Fiction comeback should have died following the historic disaster of Battlefield Earth, but after a punishing, flop-laden decade, this preternaturally resilient man-animal rebounded big time with big, flashy, embarrassing roles in two of last year's biggest sleeper hits: Hairspray (which really isn't so bad, once you take Travolta's bizarre stunt turn out of the equation) and Wild Hogs.

No mere mortal should be capable of withstanding so many flops, yet Travolta's career is never quite down for the count. Let's face it: If you can survive Moment By Moment, Two Of A Kind, The Experts, Perfect, Mad City, Lucky Numbers, Battlefield Earth, A Love Song For Bobby Long, and Lonely Hearts, you can survive just about anything, up to and including a thermonuclear war and several zombie/robot resurrections.

The End.

[* Coloring Buddy Mike counts 4 of the 18 celebrity movie stars listed for your Hollywood star coloring subjects. The Original List...
1. Bruce Willis 2. George Clooney 3. Brad Pitt 4. Nicole Kidman
5. John Travolta 6. Matthew McConaughey 7. Angelina Jolie
8. Nicolas Cage 9. Keanu Reeves 10. Hilary Swank 11. Jessica Alba
12. Sandra Bullock 13. Samuel L. Jackson 14. Jennifer Aniston
15. Halle Berry 16. Scarlett Johansson 17. Mandy Moore 18. Josh Hartnett]