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WTF Happened to Robert Zemeckis?

posted 2 years ago by TMC-4 (20179)
4 replies | jump to latest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m34L5YWUTFQ

Robert Zemeckis was one of the most prominent directors of the eighties and nineties. His string of hits is almost unmatched. Think about it - Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, What Lies Beneath, etc. This is why it’s so bizarre that a live-action Disney Pinocchio movie directed by Zemeckis and starring his best favorite leading man, Tom Hanks, was essentially dumped to streaming. It came and went without much fanfare, while it would have been a cinematic event fifteen years ago. WTF Happened?

In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, we dig into Zemeckis’ career, which began with the underrated pair I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars before Romancing the Stone made him an A-lister. We dig into how he was actually fired from Cocoon because the Fox brass thought Romancing the Stone would flop, leading to him making Back to the Future with pal Steven Spielberg. We dig into the then-impossible idea of mixing live-action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, show some love to Forrest Gump, and examine some underrated gems like Death Becomes Her.

But WTF Happened to Robert Zemeckis? In the 2000s, Zemeckis became a proponent of Motion Capture technology, leading to The Polar Express and Beowulf, movies which are a little uncanny valley if you revisit them today. Even if he’s not quite the mega-watt hitmaker he once was, with films like Welcome to Marwen being disastrous, he’s still capable of making gems like the fantastic Denzel Washington movie Flight. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, which is written (with Mathew Plale), narrated and edited by Taylor James Johnson, we dig into the director’s life, legacy and future.

[–] maul (1640) 2 years ago

Well, The Walk was pretty good, and that wasn't that long ago.

[–] Erting (202) 2 years ago

I loved The Walk, but that was five movies ago. Four straight mediocre to bad movies right afterward is the longest losing streak of Zemeckis' career. And as much as I love The Walk, some people would include it in the losing streak because of how badly it bombed at the box office.

After his mo-cap experimentation in the 2000s (which I was not a fan of), I really thought he was on his way back after the solid Flight and the terrific The Walk, but those two movies turned out to be more the outlier than the norm in the last 20 years of Zemeckis' career.

[–] Ticketsplease (4024) 2 years ago

Stop motion happened.

[–] xergan (1067) 2 years ago

Nowadays when you think of Zemeckis, you think of Uncanny Valley Movies. They might be not bad, they might be loved, but none is universally loved as his classics. Thus he ended in a meh niche.