Jim Carrey has returned to the forefront thanks to his participation in ‘Sonic: The Movie’, whose second installment will hit theaters this year. However, there was a time not so long ago when he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. In fact, in 2003 we got ‘Like God’, the highest grossing film of his entire career with 484 million worldwide revenues, but just three years later he had one of his worst years without any of his work reaching theaters.
The truth is that the following major productions after the great success of ‘Como Dios’ did not live up to expectations. ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket’ was a resounding flop in 2004, while ‘Dick and Jane, Thieves a laugh’ was a disappointment the following year. That was one of the reasons why in 2006 he chained up three films that ultimately came to nothing.
the lost movies
‘Used Guys’, ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not’ and ‘A Little Game without Consequence’ They were the three films that Carrey was about to lead in 2006 and that remained in projects never made. In the first he was going to get back into science fiction to take us to a future dominated by women, fed up with men having annoyed them on too many occasions. Here the men would be clones that can be acquired as if they were cars.
The film was also going to involve the reunion of ben stiller with Jay Roach, director of ‘Her Parents’, since he would have played the reliable clone model, while Carrey was set to play the model designed to keep women up all night. The goal was to do something along the lines of ‘Idiocracy’. The budget skyrocketed Fox decided to stop him, not even enough with the fact that Carrey agreed to lower his salary from 20 to 13.5 million dollars. Years later, an attempt was made to reactivate it with Stiller still involved, but things did not work out.
Much further along was ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not’ before paramount put the brakes on when there was barely a week to go Tim Burton start shooting a film that brought him together with Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, writers of ‘Ed Wood’, one of his best works, and also of ‘Man on the Moon’, one of the most celebrated titles in Carrey’s filmography.
Here it did not help too much that this film about the adventures of Robert Ripley It was going to cost a whopping 175 million dollars, but the key factor for the project to be paralyzed never to start again was Carrey himself. The actor had several ideas for improving the film, which Burton liked, but it involved a lot of tweaking. The studio paused the issue and Carrey had to move on to another project.
Also painful was the case of ‘A Little Game with our Consequence’, since it would have been his reunion with Cameron Diaz more than a decade after ‘The Mask’. It was a remake of the French film ‘Un petit jeu sans consequence’ released just a couple of years before that would tell the story of a couple who decides to pretend that they have filmed to see how people react.
Gabriele Muccino, who at that time was about to release ‘In Search of Happiness’, had been hired to direct it, with filming scheduled to start in October of that year for its premiere in the summer of 2007, but complications arose when There were only a few days left to start filming.
Both Muccino and Carrey and Diaz got off the ship at the last minute. The study Focus Features So he bet on trying to retain the actors by making changes to the script, since the stars of the film were not happy with the approach. The company wants a more commercial ending and the actors weren’t too keen on it, so the rewrite failed to convince them to stay. ang lee It came to sound to direct it in 2007 but nothing ever materialized.
agent change
It’s worth noting that shortly before the ‘A Little Game’ debacle, Carrey surprised everyone with a totally unexpected move: firing his agent Nick Stevens in September 2006. Stevens was the person who bet big on the success of the movie. actor on the big screen, accepting the request of the actor to deal only with that professional facet of his when where he was really making money was with his live comedy shows and thanks to the television program ‘In Living Colour’.
It was with the help of Stevens that he became a major Hollywood star, becoming the highest-paid actor in the world and the first to earn $20 million from a movie. Something that was achieved in record time, as it went from charging $450,000 for ‘Ace Ventura, Pet Detective’ to $20 million for ‘A madman at home’ less than two years later.
Deadline made a detailed review of what motivated Carrey to act in this way, but it was just another stone in a year totally forgotten. And it is true that no film was released, but he did have time to shoot one in which he showed again that he was not afraid to leave behind his usual image to star in more risky titles.
The tape in question was ‘The number 23’, a thriller of Joel Schumacher that did not conquer the public, but did not make a loss either thanks to its budget content. Of course, the actor did not want to continue down that path either and quickly returned to comedy with the vindictive ‘Say yes’. However, its premiere would not take place until 2007, and Carrey had already left behind his fateful 2006. He has the consolation that the year he received the MTV Generation Award…