WTF Happened To....?!

While Marvel fans got an incredible send-off for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine in James Mangold's Logan, another Wolverine movie was planned a few years earlier that would've taken the character in an edgier direction. Indeed, Darren Aronofsky was all set to reunite with his The Fountain star Hugh Jackman for the second spin-off sequel for the character, The Wolverine. In the end, Aronofsky left the project, with James Mangold taking over. While the finished film wasn't particularly well-loved by fans, it did pave the way for Logan, with Mangold arguably taking the franchise into an even darker direction than Mangold would have. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Unmade Movie, we look at Aronofsky's unmade Wolverine movie and try to figure out precisely what it might have been like. This episode is written by Bryan Wolford, edited by E.J. Tangonan, produced by Taylor James Johnson and narrated by Bronwyn Kelly-Seigh.

Released 16 years after the original, this sequel feels like too little too late, or too much too late? It's hard to tell here because it's kind of both. Through a lot of twists and turns, most of them either nonsensical or uninteresting, we get to meet a gang of werewolves hosting parties for victims, a stepfather who searched for a cure, a tenuous connection to the first one, and ultimately, the last third that is just so 1990s, it almost hurts. So, what happened here? Let's find out WTF Happened To This Horror Movie?

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.

If you weren’t alive in the nineties, it’s hard to do justice to just how popular Beavis & Butt-Head were. Their MTV show was cutting-edge stuff, notably, because the two Mike Judges creations often mocked the very same artists the network had only years earlier played to great success (just ask Kip Winger). In the show, Beavis and Butt-Head’s adventures were intermingled with them providing commentary on music videos, something which would eventually be phased out as the brand grew in popularity beyond MTV. It was all part of MTV’s strategy to branch out beyond music videos, with its launch coinciding with The Real World and the start of MTV Films. The latter, of course, wanted to turn the teenaged animated phenomenon into a movie. After years of prodding, Mike Judge finally agreed to make Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. A Christmas of 1996 release, the film was a sizeable hit, grossing $63.1 million domestically. Still, oddly enough, it took decades for there to be a sequel, and even then, it was a streaming premiere tied to a new series rather than a full-feature. Perhaps it was due to Mike Judge being busy with King of the Hill and his features Office Space and Idiocracy. Whatever the case, in this nostalgic episode of WTF Happened to this Movie (written by Brad Hamerly, edited by Cesar Gomez & narrated by Mathew Plale), we look back at how the film came together and how the power couple of the moment, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, ended up being part of the voice cast.

Today, we focus on one master of horror in particular and one of his final movies in his incredible filmography. Try to count how many cross-dissolve shots are in this thing as we dig into John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars and find out What Happened To This Horror Movie?

Billy Bob Thornton is an unlikely but enduring movie star. He blasted onto the scene as a character actor in movies like One False Move and Tombstone before his 1996 passion project, Sling Blade, earned him a best screenplay Academy Award while also netting him a Best Actor nomination. Made for just over $1 million, it was a solid box office hit, grossing 30 times its budget, and from there, Thornton’s career went into high gear. While his directorial career went on the back-burner after Harvey Weinstein cut his Cormac McCarthy adaptation, All the Pretty Horses, to shreds, his acting career was white-hot, earning a best-supporting actor nomination for Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and leading movies such as Monster’s Ball, Friday Night Lights, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and netting high profile supporting roles in Armageddon, Primary Colors, Bandits, Love Actually and so many more. His career really gained momentum when he signed on to play the lead in perhaps his most iconic film, Bad Santa, which became an R-rated Christmas classic. At the same time, the public became fascinated by Thornton’s eccentricities, including the fact that he and his then-wife Angelina Jolie wore pendants of each other’s blood and his well-known aversion to antique furniture. There’s also his viral CBC interview in which he sparred with the now-cancelled Jian Ghomeshi, but through it all Thornton has stayed firmly on the Hollywood A-list, with him especially prominent on TV thanks to roles on Fargo and Goliath. We dig into his career in this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, which is written (with Brad Hamerly), narrated and produced by Taylor James Johnson, and edited by Adam Walton.

When it comes to the all-time craziest and most unbelievable true stories ever committed to celluloid, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (starring Al Pacino and the late, great John Cazale) tops the list. Ripped right from the headlines, the stranger-than-fiction true-crime story about three men attempting to rob a bank during broad daylight in the dead of summer in New York - only to become a grueling 14-hour hostage situation and high-profile media circus - will forever live in infamy due to how incredibly outlandish the details are. While the names of the primary players have been changed for the big-screen adaption, and while many fascinating tidbits about the case were slightly altered or omitted from the final film, the overwhelming majority of what transpires in Dog Day Afternoon really happened on one sweltering summer day in August 1972. Come closer y’all, it’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff and find out What The F*ck Really Happened to Dog Day Afternoon!

Zombies have been all the rage for decades at this point. Just when you think they're going to fade, there's another movie that comes along that revitalizes the sub-genre. But back before the days of The Walking Dead, zombies were considerably less popular. With 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake came fast zombies and a renewed interest in zombies. This meant the Godfather of Zombie himself could finally make another film in his Dead series. So we're diving into it all as we figure out what happened to George A. Romero's Land of the Dead.

There was a time that Ozzy Osbourne was considered the most wildly unpredictable, dangerous man in heavy metal. This was the guy that bit the head off a live bat during a concert in 1982, drank Vince Neil’s urine and snorted a line of ants like cocaine amid a bender. The former Black Sabbath front-man was a legend, to the point that many of us, as kids, weren’t allowed to listen to his music or - God Forbid - watch his music videos. But here’s the thing - Ozzy mellowed. First, in the late eighties/early nineties, he became more of a conventional metal guy with his killer album, No More Tears, but that was nothing compared to how, in the early 2000s, he became an unlikely pioneer of reality TV. His MTV show, The Osbournes, introduced us to his loving family, including his brilliant wife Sharon (responsible for much of his success being his manager), Kelly and Jack. Suddenly Ozzy became - family-friendly. One might even say the formerly Satanic rocker became wholesome in his old age. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, we look at Ozzy’s hard-partying days and contrast them to the more mature Ozzy seen in recent years. This episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity is written (with Brad Hamerly), narrated, edited and produced by Taylor James Johnson. Let us know what you think of Ozzy these days in the comments!

I know what you’re thinking - WTF Happened to The Avengers? Nothing, it was one of the biggest hits ever. Not so fast - we’re not talking about the Marvel superhero team-up that shot the MCU into the stratosphere. Instead, we’re talking about 1998’s misbegotten remake of the classic British spy series, The Avengers. On paper, this should have been a great movie. The Avengers was a classic British TV series starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg as super spy agents John Steed and Emma Peel. Their “will they or won’t they” chemistry influenced everything from Cheers to Moonlighting, and the show still runs daily in the UK. Given that the show was always considered the best Eurospy franchise outside of James Bond, it should have turned into a massive franchise for Warner Bros. The cast was next-level, with Uma Thurman playing Emma Peel, Ralph Fiennes as John Steed, and James Bond himself, Sean Connery, as the main villain, Sir August de Wynter. So what went wrong? Just about everything, as we’ll dig into in this episode of WTF Happened to this Movie. For one thing, the finished version of the film clocked in at 89 minutes, about a half hour shorter than intended. Director Jeremiah Chechik found himself saddled with a finished film that didn’t make a lick of sense. Given the issues with the cut, instead of being a summer blockbuster, it was dumped to the same late-summer dumping ground we find ourselves in right now (there’s a reason nothing really opens until after Labor Day). So dig in and check out this tale of the spy franchise that wasn’t. For more MOVIE NEWS, visit: http://www.joblo.com

Most of us know Cursed as the terrible Wes Craven Werewolf movie, right? This film's troubled production dragged out for years and resulted in an entirely different movie in the end. But what about that first cut? The one that featured Skeet Ulrich, Robert Forster, and Mandy Moore. So join us as we take a look at the original cut of 2005's Cursed.

The sequences of a Final Destination film will play through your head over and over long after the film ends. They're visceral and have a certain quality that really allows you to put yourself in the situation. So by the time the third entry came along, they had to up the ante to really shock audiences. Heck, the second outing had a legendary highway sequence. How could they possibly top that? We'll see if they managed it as we cover the rollercoaster mayhem of Final Destination 3.

They say, "In space, no one can hear you scream." But we've seen through eight Alien films that plenty of people can hear you scream if you're in a spaceship. The Xenomorphs have no problem causing their victims a lot of pain. Even though we've seen them in many films, fans will mostly agree that after Aliens, the franchise was never the same. In 2015, filmmaker Neill Blomkamp announced he had been working on a new Alien project. This was even a surprise to Fox, which owned the series. Fans seemed excited by the prospect of the director taking on the project after the imaginative sci-fi films he had been releasing. Ultimately, Neil Blomkamp's Alien 5 would fall apart after some starts and stops. Let's find out exactly why here on What Happened To This Unmade Movie

Megan Fox was the “It Girl” of the second half of the 2000s. When she showed up as the love interest in Michael Bay’s Transformers, she quickly became one of the most desired women on the planet, but Hollywood didn’t quite seem sure what to do with her for the longest time. While Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a hit, she was famously written out of the third film. Her roles in movies like Jonah Hex fell flat, while her big star vehicle, Jennifer’s Body, was a flop - albeit one that’s been reappraised recently. While a lot was made over the fact that she compared her Transformers director, Michael Bay, to Hitler, there seems to be no love lost between the two, with him casting her in his two big-budget Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies as April O’Neil. They failed to launch an enduring franchise, and now Fox is mainly known for the notoriety of her relationship with Machine Gun Kelly. But, and here’s the kicker - while her low-budget movies haven’t been particularly well-received, her acting in them has often been quite good, surprising critics that otherwise pan the movies. With a prominent role opposite Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham in The Expendables 4 (aka Expend4bles), could a legit comeback be on the horizon? We dig into it in this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, written and narrated by Taylor James Johnson and edited by Juan Jimenez.

Yo ho mateys! One of the most unlikely franchises to become a multi-billion dollar grossing juggernaut was indeed Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series. Led by Johnny Depp’s iconic Jack Sparrow, the series has run five instalments (to date) and grossed an estimated 4.5 billion dollars worldwide. This is pretty incredible considering that, in 2003, the first film was seen as a huge gamble. Pirate-based swashbucklers hadn’t been popular since the days of Errol Flynn, and modern attempts to revitalize the genre, including 1983’s Nate & Hayes, Roman Polanski’s Pirates and 1995’s Cutthroat Island, were all notorious flops. Add to that the fact that Johnny Depp was going pretty far out with his “hero” Jack Sparrow, who looked much more like Keith Richards than Errol Flynn, and you had one nervous studio. However, the resulting film was an absolute smash, leading to four sequels of varying quality. In this episode of WTF You Need to Know About This Franchise (written, edited and narrated by Kier Gomes and produced by Tyler Nichols), we dig into the saga and give our picks for which Jack Sparrow adventures you should go on and which ones you can skip.

When director Sean S. Cunningham set out to make the original FRIDAY THE 13TH, he was trying to craft a cinematic rollercoaster ride. His little independent production was such a crowd-pleasing thrill ride it became one of the biggest hits of 1980. And spawned a franchise that is still going on to this day. So let’s celebrate FRIDAY THE 13TH by looking back and figuring out WTF Happened To This Horror Movie?

Now, I know what you’re thinkin’ punk; what’s the deal with making an episode about WTF Happened to this Celebrity about Clint Eastwood? Nothing happened to him. He’s still making movies at ninety-two. Indeed, you would be correct - but we here at JoBlo are such massive fans of Eastwood that we couldn’t help but whip together an awesome WTF episode exploring his life and legacy. The fact is, it’s unlikely any other actor has ever had the impact that ol’ Clint did. Sure, others were maybe better actors, but were there better “stars”? And not only that, but he’s been directing movies since the seventies, and some of them are all-out masterpieces such as Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and so many more. In this episode, we trace Clint’s humble beginnings, as a second lead on the show Rawhide, through his breakout as the “Man with No Name” in a trilogy of westerns with Sergio Leone, through the Dirty Harry series, his passion projects like Bird and so much more. So sit back, relax and enjoy WTF Happened to Clint Eastwood, written (with Brad Hamerly), narrated, produced and edited by Taylor James Johnson.

It’s not a stretch to say that James Cameron’s The Terminator might be one of the most influential movies of all time. Produced on a shoestring budget, The Terminator introduced the world to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, mother of the human resistance. In this original classic, Arnie’s T-800 is a terrifying figure, much different from the heroic character we’d come to love in the sequels. Here, he’s sent back to kill Sarah Connor before she can give birth to her son John Connor, only to be protected by a heroic soldier from the future, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). With its iconic, menacing score by Brad Fiedel and novel FX via Stan Winston, The Terminator is considered by many to be one of the best sci-fi action hybrids ever. Still, the road to the big screen was not easy for James Cameron’s epic. We’ll dive right in on this week’s WTF Happened to this Movie, written and narrated by Dave Davis and edited by Juan Jimenez.

John Carpenter’s The Thing didn’t go over well when it was released in 1982. Ignored by movie-goers, it was a box office failure. Reviled by critics, it even saw Carpenter labeled a pornographer of violence by some reviewers. It was such a disappointment for the studio they took another project away from Carpenter as punishment. But it gradually found its audience, building up a cult following. And soon, a legion of fans and critics alike began calling it one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It didn’t take long for THE THING to go from being known as reprehensible trash to being considered an all-time classic. So let’s take a look at the making of this classic with a new episode of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie?

Every kid of a certain age grew up wanting to be Jackie Chan. A legend in Hong Kong and most of the world from the late-seventies on, Jackie Chan also, at long last, became a superstar in North America after the release of his 1996 classic Rumble in the Bronx. Supercop, First Strike and more dubbed versions of his Hong Kong movies would follow, but it was 1998’s Rush Hour, which paired him with Chris Tucker, that made him a phenomenon in the United States. It was as if, at long last, the United States was let in on a secret the rest of the world already knew. Jackie Chan emerged in the late nineties after a failed attempt to make him into a Bruce Lee clone. Never wanting to be a typical martial arts star, Chan opted to mix comedy and martial arts in a way that made him a household name throughout much of the world in the eighties. His movies like Police Story, Wheels on Meals (you read that right), Dragons Forever, Armour of God (which almost killed him), and more were giant hits worldwide. The U.S did indeed try to use him in a few films, with him having minor roles opposite Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run and its sequel, and he got solo action films (in English) with The Big Brawl and The Protector. Neither film’s director knew how to use him, especially in The Protector, which tried to make him into a Clint Eastwood-style tough guy, a formula that didn’t mesh with Chan at all, leading to him temporarily swearing off U.S movies. Finally, in the nineties, he could do it his way, and in this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, written (with Mathew Plale), narrated, and edited by Taylor James Johnson, we trace his career and where he’s at now.