Credit: All-Pro Reels
Films can be thought of as a bit like cooking. You put every ingredient in there necessary to make them a success: a director with a name, an all-star cast, a well-written script and a storyline that lures audiences in, but sometimes, despite following the recipe word for word, the flambé, so to speak, does not rise.
This is where a producer comes in. It is quite literally their job to try to do everything possible to mitigate financial risk. Despite this, some films still end up bombing at the box office – Matthew McConaughey is no stranger to the occasional box-office bomb… One of the more painful examples, however, came in 2016 with Gold, a film that had been expected to be a major awards player for both McConaughey and the Weinstein Company.
The crime drama saw McConaughey portray Kenny Wells, a paunchy, balding prospector who, after losing his family business, travels to Indonesia and teams up with geologist Michael Acosta in search of gold – the film was loosely based on the 1997 Bre-X mining scandal, in which a supposedly massive gold deposit was discovered in Indonesia.
On paper, Gold appeared to have plenty going for it: McConaughey fully threw himself into the role, even gaining 47 pounds to play Wells, and to back his commitment, the Weinstein Company appeared determined to push the film as a serious awards season contender – the film was initially dated for a wide release on Christmas Day before being moved to a limited awards-qualifying run on December 30th.
The plan was eventually to release Gold worldwide on January 27th, just three days after the Oscar nominations were announced… The Weinstein Company clearly hoped that some late awards buzz could carry the film into the wider market.
Instead, the film received mixed to poor reviews from critics, and whatever hopes it had for awards quickly dissipated. Audiences largely stayed away, too – made on a production budget of $20million, Gold took just $14.9m at the worldwide box office, with the Weinstein Company reportedly spending another $20m on marketing.
For McConaughey, the failure was particularly frustrating because he had committed himself so fully to the role, but it was not the first time he had watched one of his films fail to live up to expectations – a year earlier, he had starred in Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, playing a man who travels to Aokigahara, the infamous Japanese forest associated with suicide, where he encounters another man who has come there for the same reason.
Despite the film’s intriguing premise and Van Sant’s reputation as the director of Good Will Hunting and My Own Private Idaho, it was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews – made for around $25million, it eventually grossed less than $1m worldwide and McConaughey later admitted that even he was surprised by how the film turned out, elaborating, “It was a beautiful script, a haiku… I ended up liking the script more than the finished product.”
But Gold appears to have hurt in a different way. This was a film McConaughey had physically transformed himself for, while a major studio had spent millions trying to position it as an awards contender. Yet when asked about the film years later, his assessment was brutally simple.
“Dude, that didn’t even see the light of day,” McConaughey said. “It came and went. Boom. Bye-bye.” It is a particularly stark assessment of a film that had once been positioned as an awards hopeful… All the ingredients were there: the star, the transformation, the money and the Oscar campaign, but in the end, however, none of them could stop Gold from disappearing almost as quickly as it arrived.
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