Dungeons & Dragons
2000 / Action, Adventure, Fantasy / Canada, USA, Czech Republic
Another commercial should not fail due to swords, dragons, magic, and a powerful ensemble. Jeremy Irons is unlikely to include this picture among his favorite roles today, and the producers, who did everything possible to reduce the cost of production but still could not pay for it, still cannot understand how this happened.
Fanfan la Tulipe
2003/Documentary, Short film/France
The French, meanwhile, also decided not to wait for better times and launched a remake of another film about heroes with a sword, albeit not as bright and charismatic as Zorro. But beloved all over the world, who knows Fanfan by Gerard Philip? Vincent Perez tried to make Fanboy tougher and hooligan in the spirit of the new time, but the film went relatively modestly, because Pirates of the Caribbean, too strong a competitor, arrived in time.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
1988/Comedy, Adventure, Fantasy/Italy, UK
A big failure awaited the adventure film by Terry Gilliam, and the presence of first-tier stars again did not help. Gilliam is perhaps too talented to be super popular, and the scope of his ideas is too big for him to afford to make cheap films. This picture, like all of Gilliam’s, has cult status, but for large studios, this is rarely a reason to invest serious funds in production.
Don Juan DeMarco
1995 / Comedy, Drama, Melodrama/USA
Against the backdrop of commercial madness, this sweet and modest picture passed almost imperceptibly for a wide audience, where Johnny Depp played a lunatic who imagined himself to be Don Juan, and Marlon Brando played a psychiatrist who believed that lunatics are those who imagine themselves to be nothing and not about what they don’t dream of. Subsequently, Pavel Ruminov made one of his best films, The Visit of the Musketeer, about the same. And the Depp-Brando couple remained in the memory of a few viewers as a standard of style and acting.
Captain Blood
1935/Adventure, Action/USA
But adventure movies, including those about pirates, were once a huge success in the United States. Take at least this super hit—it, by the way, was hit by the same Michael Curtiz, who went down in history as the director of Casablanca, but that was already years later. And then, in the mid-’30s, the film Captain Blood became a huge hit and spread all over the world, including the USSR (however, we got it many years after it was released in the USA).