Anatomy of a flop: How a horribly misguided movie like Mortdecai made it into theaters

(Image credit: (Lionsgate/David Appleby))

last updated 28 January 2015

Not all flops are created equal. Plenty of movies bomb with critics and audiences, but every so often, there comes a movie so colossally misconceived — an Oogiloves or a Winter's Tale — that it merits closer analysis.

This month brought us the latest entrant in this ignominious pantheon: Mortdecai, a brutally unfunny action-comedy starring a mustachioed Johnny Depp that survived through buffoonish stumble after buffoonish stumble on its way to box-office infamy last weekend.

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1973: British author Kyril Bonfiglioli publishes Don't Point That Thing at Me, the first in a series of comic novels about an aristocratic art dealer named Charlie Mortdecai. Bonfiglioli's novels attract a devoted cult following and are consistently praised by a wide variety of publications, including The New Yorker, which later describes his work as being like "an unholy collaboration between P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming."

2003: Johnny Depp plays Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The idiosyncratic performance, which eventually nets him an Oscar nomination and becomes the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar franchise, turns Depp into the rarest of Hollywood actors: the kind with the clout to get a project greenlit based solely on his involvement. In the decade that follows, Depp uses his newfound power to launch several passion projects, including a big-screen adaptation of the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows.

Depp's interest in Mortdecai also begins with Pirates of the Caribbean. During filming, co-star Jack Davenport lends Depp his personal collection of Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai novels, and Depp resolves to bring the character to the big screen. "So it's all Jack Davenport's fault," Depp later confesses, before conceding that he is the movie's true driving force: "I thought this would be amazing to bring to the screen, but would be impossible. And it almost was. It took 10 years." Without Depp's enthusiasm for the material (and his willingness to take the title role), it's hard to imagine the movie ever being made.

July 2013: Screenwriter Eric Aronson — whose sole prior screenwriting credit comes from 2001's misbegotten Lance Bass vehicle On the Line — writes an adaptation of Bonfiglioli's novels for the big screen. In a decision that prefigures Mortdecai's bizarrely moustache-centric ad campaign, Aronson grafts the moustache subplot from the fourth book, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery, onto his loose interpretation of Don't Point That Thing at Me. ("The moustache is Mortdecai's own sense of his freedom," he later explains.)

Depp sends David Koepp, who directed him in Secret Window, the Aronson script for Mortdecai. "I read it, and within about two or three pages, I knew why [Johnny Depp] wanted to do it, and I knew that he was probably the only person who could do it," Koepp later declares. Depp formally signs on, leading a cast that swells to include Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor, Olivia Munn, and Paul Bettany as Mortdecai's manservant Jock Strapp.

Feb. 7, 2014: Lionsgate, flush with the success of franchises like The Hunger Games, has high hopes for Mortdecai. In a phone call with analysts, Lionsgate Chairman Jon Feltheimer says that he expects Mortdecai to spawn an entire film series, calling the foppish protagonist a "franchisable character" in the vein of The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau. Mortdecai is "a character that Johnny Depp absolutely loved and would love to do more of," he says. Mortdecai is slated for release in early 2015.

The promotional account is just one element of the extensive ad campaign for the film, which leans heavily on inscrutable images of Johnny Depp with a mustache. @PartTimeRogue will spend the following months shilling for Mortdecai in a rough approximation of the title character's style of speech, riffing on everything from the Golden Globes to the premiere of Parks & Recreation. It is very, very irritating — particularly when sponsored @PartTimeRogue tweets are aggressively promoted in the Twitter feeds of nonfollowers.

Jan. 16, 2015: In a lengthy post that channels the general sense of annoyance over the omnipresent ad campaign for the film, Vulture's Abraham Riesman asks a simple question: What the hell is Mortdecai? "They're acting like Mortdecai is some kind of major franchise that we're already supposed to be jazzed about," he writes. "Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but I have never met a single person who has any prior knowledge of — let alone name-brand recognition of — Mortdecai."

Jan. 25, 2015: On its opening weekend, Mortdecai debuts at No. 9 with a terrible $4.1 million gross — well under even the very modest projections set by box-office analysts. Those that did see it weren't big on it; the film earned a C+ CinemaScore, which all but ensures terrible word-of-mouth in the weeks to come. The Mortdecai franchise has been killed in its infancy. @PartTimeRogue, undaunted, makes a joke about 2007's Sopranos finale.

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.

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