Success in Hollywood is never guaranteed. Actors can spend months working twelve-hour days on a set only for a movie to debut well below expectations both critically and financially. I can only imagine the dread of putting in time on a movie that has all the signs of being a flop, though it's worth noting that sometimes the actors get it wrong.
A Reddit thread had tons of people chiming in with examples when this happened, starting with a pretty notable example. SpaceTimer81 brought up one of the best Julia Roberts movies, and how two stars thought it was going to be a bomb:
Jason Alexander use to tell a story about a film he did with Richard Gere. They would talk about how nothing in the script made sense. The scenes were confusing and all out of order. They were convinced it was a trash movie and would bomb completely. The movie was Pretty Woman.
Quite a way to kick things off, and it certainly caught me off guard. Richard Gere has talked in the past about improvised scenes and other things, but I guess he wouldn't want to dwell on the fact that he thought it would fail. Not only was it a success, but Roberts was also nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.
Article continues belowThe next movie I'd rank among the best, if not the best, comedy movies of the 2000s. That said, the cast of Anchorman didn't think the movie was going to work out when they made it, as MatureUsername69 explained:
The cast of Anchorman pretty famously thought it wasn't gonna work because it was so random and heavily improvised. Turns out it works so well that they were able to release 2 different versions of it with all different jokes.
I'm definitely biased because Anchorman came out just before I started high school, but how wild would it be to see how relevant that movie still is today? If I had a dollar every time I said I was "trapped in a glass case of emotion" or "I love lamp," well, I'd be a wealthy man. Maybe they thought it would flop because of the movie's original pitch?
We've covered romantic movies and comedies, so it's only fitting that an action one is up next. Tom Hardy has been in some great movies across his career, but he thought there was a solid chance one of his biggest would be DOA when it was in theaters, according to Kit_Daniels:
Tom Hardy was famously skeptical about Mad Max: Fury Road until seeing the final product come together.
This one I totally get. Readers likely know that movies aren't shot in the same sequence we see in the final product, so Tom Hardy probably had no idea what was going on between days of shooting car chases and random action scenes. I can't imagine any of it would make sense until seeing the finished movie, which was very well-received.
Some actors go on to be proven wrong about their movies doing poorly, and it doesn't matter. SnugglyCoderGuy brought up the famous case of Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, and his reaction to seeing it for the first time:
Burt Reynolds saw a rough cut or something of Boogie Nights and hated it so much he fired his agent and was such a sour puss about it that people speculate it cost him an Oscar award for his role in it.
In fairness, Burt Reynolds famously hated working on Boogie Nights, so it did go a bit deeper than merely not liking the movie. Not even Paul Thomas Anderson could escape the actor's wrath, as he spoke critically of the then-young director.
Finally, we have a movie that had a different path to fame. Tremors is one of Kevin Bacon's best movies, but DamnitGravity indicated he more or less thought his career was over when he did the movie:
'I'M IN A MOVIE ABOUT GIANT WORMS!' Joke's on Kevin Bacon, Tremors became a cult classic!
Fortunately, the cult classic continued to keep Bacon a household name, and he's still enjoying an acting career to this day. Thank goodness for people embracing the movie, or we'd never have that game where people try to connect random celebrities to him.
Now I'm looking at the upcoming 2026 movie schedule, and wondering if any actors were in movies this year that they expect to fail. Our comments are open for any Hollywood celebrity who wants to confess, though I don't think it'd be the best PR move to do so.
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