In 2004, six movies starring Jude Law were released in three months, and Jude Law became an unfair shorthand for Hollywood’s failure to bring new stars to the world.
Photo: Paramount/Courtesy of Everett Collection
“Who is Jude Law?” The question asked by Chris Rock in his opening monologue at the 2005 Academy Awards was as much an accusation as it was rhetoric. That was after a three-month stretch at the end of 2004 in which Law appeared in six films, but each time one of those projects failed, the gaudy statistic grew closer to notoriety. Rock, who was hosting the Oscars for the first time, slammed Hollywood for making movies too quickly and producing too few real stars. “If you can’t get a movie star, just wait,” Rock joked. “If you want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law…wait.”
It was the sour cherry on top of what had been a rough few months for Law. Law appeared in some capacity in six films, the digital adventure pastiche Sky Captain and the World, which was released from September 17 to December 17, 2004. Tomorrow, we’ll see the existential comedy I Heart Huckabees, the romantic comedy remake Alfie, the affair drama Closer, Scorsese’s epic biopic The Aviator, and the dark comedy The Aviator. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemon Snicket, adapted from the book. Although some of these films were more successful than others, Law’s reputation as a rising movie star took a significant hit. And the backlash to that season directly changed the trajectory of his career. 4, with the exception of the romantic comedy “The Holiday” and Warner Bros. The second most popular Sherlock Holmes film after Robert Downey Jr., Law hadn’t appeared in another major studio film for 14 years before being cast as Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts. Even Eddie Redmayne was the star of those movies).
Law wasn’t in the audience at the 2005 Oscars due to a dressing down, but when Rock complained that Law was in “everything” that year, his Closer co-star Clive Owen and Natalie Portman were laughing nervously. “Even the movies he’s not in,” Rock joked. “If you look at the credits, he was making cupcakes or something. He’s in everything! He’s gay, he’s straight, he’s American, he’s British, Next year he will play Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a movie.
Law’s other co-star, Sean Penn (who appears in All the King’s Men, which is currently filming), apparently spent the night stewing over Rock’s withering assessment of Law’s star power. It seems like it was. Stopping from the script, he said, “Forgive my compromised sense of humor, but in answer to the host’s question, who is Jude Law? He’s one of our greatest actors…” he declared.
Twenty years later, Law has settled comfortably into the post-matinee idol stage of her career. This month, he’s promoting his roles as a grizzled FBI agent in The Order and a Force-powered villain in Star Wars: The Skeleton Crew. The enthusiasm and appreciation for his performance now makes the backlash from 20 years ago a faded memory. But it’s a curiosity worth considering, and it says as much about the state of movie stars in the mid-2000s as it does about Law’s career.
Until 2004, the optimistic mid-August calculations about Raw’s star trajectory made perfect sense. He was an insanely handsome and charismatic actor who had been nominated for two Oscars (for The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain) by the age of 32. Directors, studios, and entertainment media all picked up that ball and ran with it. In October 2004, Vanity Fair placed Law on the cover of its “New Establishment” issue, listing Law’s upcoming six-film cast (including his longtime wife Sadie Frost, who became tabloid fodder). In addition to her recent divorce, she posted a profile centered on her husband. new romantic entanglement with Sienna Miller). But even VF expressed some reservations about Law’s suggestion of superiority, saying, “He can do period dramas and modern times, drama and comedy,” profile author Krista Smith said. “He has the looks, the intelligence and the passion. His talent is undisputed. But questions remain as to whether Law is truly a movie star. In Hollywood, a movie star is defined by Is he too beautiful to play Tom Hanks’ Everyman? Is there a lack of simplicity?”
That undercurrent of concern and skepticism surfaced again and again in coverage of the “autumn of the law” (my words, not theirs). Entertainment Weekly mentioned Law’s “possible overexposure” in its “Fall Movie Previews” issue. Law himself acknowledged his concerns in an interview with the Washington Post. “The cynic in me says… It took me two years to make this. I chose all these because they are so different, helmed by different directors, different Because they were different types of movies in different genres. And now they’re being lumped together and compared and people just think, ‘Oh, Jude Law again,’ and some of it gets overlooked. I guess.”
As Rock’s monologue proved, that was exactly the common reaction. Just two weeks after Alfie opened with $6.2 million and finished in a disappointing fifth place at the box office (behind Pixar mastermind The Incredibles, the second week of Rey and Thor, and the third week of The Grudge), EW It had already been broadcast with the following headline: “Why can’t Jude Law release a big movie?” The magazine said, “Maybe Americans don’t like such a handsome Englishman,” and “He’s a character actor with the body of a leading man.” He came up with a theory that said, What was left unsaid, because neither EW nor anyone else could know the future, was that Hollywood was entering a period of crisis for movie stars. The “death of a movie star” has been chronicled time and time again in recent years, with Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Ryan Gosling, or anyone we imagine capable of making audiences flock to them. It’s reported almost every time one of the countless A-listers appears. Instead, its theatrical opening weekend was a flop.
The number of actors whose films are guaranteed to gross more than $25 million in their opening weekend was rare in 2004, but it’s even fewer now, and that list includes Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and others. , and now even Cruise has almost the same name. However, there is a caveat that says, “Only for Mission: Impossible or Top Gun movies.” Unbeknownst to many, the IP era was already creeping into Hollywood, and Law’s star status was one of the first to be trampled upon by the IP era. The No. 1 movie of 2004 will ultimately be Shrek 2. No non-sequel film would top the annual box office for five years (2009’s Avatar), and only two non-series films have done so since then. (American Sniper in 2014, Barbie in 2023). Hollywood had already stopped producing new movie stars as we once defined them. We just didn’t realize it yet.
The “six movies worth of excess” story assigned to Law was also a bit disingenuous. Law’s role in The Aviator amounted to a brief cameo as Errol Flynn. During that time, he was only an invisible narrator in “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” You’d have to be operating at an incredibly low Jude Law fatigue threshold to be overwhelmed by the actor’s presence in any of these movies. And yet, unfairly, every time Law’s 2004 effort is cited as a flop – as Alfie and Sky Captain certainly were – he was criticized for the $100 million domestic gross for The Aviator. He never benefited from $2 million or A Series of Unfortunate Events’ $118 million.
Of course, four movies in three months is still a lot. And the four films in which Law actually starred were overwhelming works with their own unique tastes. I Heart Huckabees is certainly the best of the four films, creative and funny enough to withstand director David O. It was too “indie”. The Closer was a Mike Nichols movie starring Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, and Natalie Portman, but even though Owen and Portman won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, the film received a high Oscar nomination. It fell short of expectations (and Law, who plays a deranged adulterer, was completely ignored throughout the season).
Still, at least Closer and the Huckabees were in the mix. Sky Captain and Alphys were the biggest failures in this, and both of them fell squarely on Law’s shoulders. He directed and riffed on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in its early days, an old-school adventure drama set in a sci-fi future and shot with real actors against fully CGI backgrounds. He produced the film under the banner of Rough Productions. . Critics and audiences alike initially had no idea what to make of the film and its giant robots, warships, faded color scheme, and digitally resurrected Laurence Olivier.
But they certainly knew what to think about the remake of Alfie, directed by Charles Scheyer and starring Law, made famous by Michael Caine. They didn’t like it. And after a marketing gambit that included an original Mick Jagger song, a grin-inducing trailer, and Lowe hosting an infamous episode of Saturday Night Live (yes, after that Ashlee Simpson lip-syncing gaffe) , it was Law who apologized), and Alfie became like this. It was properly thrown into the trash. Unfortunately, out of all six of Law’s movies in 2004, this was the one that was supposed to be the lead role. The movie “Raw” becomes a success solely due to the charisma of the movie star. As a referendum on his star power, Alfie’s critical and box office failure could not have been more damaging. Looking back now, it’s an event that Law clearly regrets. “I think[it was]bad behavior,” Law told GQ UK last month. “I felt like the[materials]weren’t up to the mark, it was a little light, and it felt a little cheap.”
The remaining eight years were a rocky road for Lowe, with unsuccessful Oscar fodder like All the King’s Men and arthouse fare like Wong Kar-wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Nights. It was full of rare items. Ironically, the one exception that has stood the test of time is The Holiday, directed by Nancy Meyers (formerly Mrs. Charles Shire). After this film, Law began to find his footing in roles that proved that he was indeed the “character actor in the body of the hero” we often hear about. He played roles like a cuckolded politician in Anna Karenina, a conspiracy theorist podcaster (ridiculous!) in Contagion, and a disappointingly fallible James Bond in The Spy. Law brought to light the sleazy music manager in “Vox Lux” and the greed-tainted capitalist in “The Nest.” A kind of thwarted ambition. Over the years, he has successfully capitalized on aging and the accompanying decline in youthful beauty. This guy turns a receding hairline into a better character choice than any actor in this industry.
The answer to “Who is Jude Law?” The answer has been definitively given – not by the grumpy Sean Penn, but by Law, who played a role that Tom Cruise would never touch for the past 20 years. By performing it many times. And since then, he has never released more than three movies in a year.
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