Eight Razzies "for the worst performance of Bruce Willis in 2021": how the highest-paid actor in Hollywood fell into the hell of the cinema of balance

In 2013 Sylvester Stallone described Bruce Willis as "lazy and greedy", which was, according to the interpreter of

and

"a sure formula for failure".

Stallone had offered him three million for three days' work on

, and Willis had asked for another million.

Almost a decade later, those two reproaches, laziness and greed, seem the only explanation for the future of Willis's career: whoever was the highest paid actor in Hollywood now has his own category at the Razzie awards, the

called "Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie".

There are eight candidates.

All have been released directly in domestic format.

How did you get here?

Perhaps it all started sometime in the 2000s.

Bruce Willis (Idar-Oberstein, Germany, 66 years old) then began to show signs of having tired of fighting his destiny, of having critics against him and the public on his side only when he played losers in action movies.

The only thing left for him was to do that, the action movies that were expected of him.

He started taking roles in generic action

that he plays with an earpiece so he doesn't have to learn the lines.

His last attempt to achieve prestige was in 2015. Forged on Broadway but after 30 years without stepping on stage, he returned to the theater with an adaptation of

and the critics sank him with adjectives like "inert" or "empty".

Since that flop, Willis has only made low-budget movies released straight to home.

If the public was unable to look at him without seeing anything other than

if Hollywood no longer had room for him because they are only interested in franchises, he decided that he could become one.

The wholesale manufacturer of the product would be Randall Emmet.

Bruce Willis and producer Randall Emmett, responsible for almost all the audiovisual products in which he appears in recent years.Michael Stewart

Crossing paths with this producer is the worst thing that has ever happened to Willis' prestige and the best thing that has ever happened to his bank account.

According to the Vulture website, Emmet has set up a mass film production system that consists of bringing together a team of budding professionals who want to build a resume, convincing a veteran star to shoot for a couple of days in exchange for a million dollars (Travolta, Pacino, Cage, De Niro, Seagal, Malkovich) and use his face on the poster to get international distribution deals.

The star usually appears in three scenes: one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end.

In

Willis appeared a total of seven minutes, in

eight, in

almost ten.

He has made 29 movies in eight years, 20 of them with Randall Emmet, 23 have been released straight to home, and 16 have less than 10% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

These types of products, however, are profitable because they still have their audience:

slipped into the

10 of Netflix in 2020, four years after its premiere.

If they offered him something better, it is possible to assume that he would accept it, but in an industry that no longer knows what to do with him, Willis finds himself in the position of staying at home with his arms crossed or earning easy money on shoots where he is still the king.

Most veterans in his situation opt for the latter.

As with Cage, De Niro or Pacino, there is speculation about economic problems: it must not be easy to give up a certain standard of living.

Nicolas Cage got into the series B market because the treasury demanded 14 million dollars from him and this type of film means easy money and, above all, fast: a Hollywood production, for which Cage or Willis could charge more money , takes ages to get up while Randall Emmett's get up and running in a matter of weeks.

To produce one of these byproducts, all you have to do is find an investor (which could be movie producers, heirs, oil tycoons, or tech gurus) who is a fan of Bruce Willis.

Dan Bilzerian contributed to the financing of

The

in exchange for a role in

alongside Willis.

For the same reason,

are credited with 22 executive producers.

Two Heroes From Different Schools: Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone at a Los Angeles Premiere in 2011. Jeff Kravitz (FilmMagic)

Emmet isn't afraid to piss off his investors, his directors, or his writers.

He scrimps on every dollar and cuts shooting days to a minimum.

A producer who has worked with Emmett told

that projects with Willis in particular have "an exploitative and

nature " because shooting days are cut as they go.

During the filming of

, the actor decided to reduce his participation from two days to a single day: the director had to squeeze all the possible scenes out of him in a single day.

"Why does Bruce Willis keep making movies he clearly hates?"

asked in 2020. That's another question with a long answer.

Bruce Willis has always seen himself as a loser with the whole system against him, at least that's what those who know him well told

in 1991.

The complex comes from his childhood.

As a child he suffered from a stutter that, as he told the journalist David Sheff in 1996, he overcame thanks to the theater: if he memorized his sentences he would not stutter.

From there, Willis built a character according to his physique: a sarcastic, ironic guy who didn't care about anything.

He is the character that the public would later know as

and, throughout his career, the actor would play different variations of it.

The first was in the television series

, released in Spain in 1986.

Network executives wanted a star, so Willis had to do eleven

to convince them.

In the last one there was a woman who stood up and said: "I don't know if he's a hunk or not, but it looks like sleeping with him is like fucking with danger."

She got the part from her.

Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in a publicity image of the first episode of 'Moonlight', broadcast in 1985.ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES (Disney General Entertainment Con)

The lopsided half smile was his most characteristic gesture of seduction.

“I've been called arrogant by some of the best writers in this country,” Willis lamented in 1996. “At the beginning of

everyone was like, 'We love it, how captivating.'

Then it turned negative: 'I'd like to wipe that smile off your face.'

The failure of his two films with director Blake Edwards,

(1987) and

(1988) and, above all, the decision to record an R&B album with Motown, title it

and release a single called, paradoxically,

(Respect Yourself) turned Willis into a joke for the intellectual elites.

Willis was an atypical and modern heartthrob, a scoundrel, a worker who Hollywood let in but would never let him forget that he was there on loan.

That's why when he received the highest salary in Hollywood to date, five million dollars, for

, the industry and the press went crazy.

“If Willis is worth five million” headlined

, “how much can Robert Redford ask for?”

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Alan Ladd Jr. expressed the industry's concern: "This will send business out of control."

The Fox studio insisted that Willis was worth the money.

Only he could pull off an action hero who seemed to come from the street, so miserable and so cynical that he seemed to know he was in a movie: in the sequel, set in an airport, he exclaimed with good reason “What are the chances? that this happens to the same guy twice?

Bruce Willis and Billy Joel sharing a stage in 1987. Lynn Goldsmith (Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Willis didn't have to fake that "badass attitude," because he had grown up with it.

As a teenager he worked in his father's steel mill and, while playing roles in fringe theaters on Broadway, he bartended in trendy New York bars until he landed a job in

.

“Every time he puts on a tuxedo,” explained critic Alex Pappademas, “it looks like he just came from fighting a bull in it.”

Unlike Stallone or Schwarzenegger, Willis's muscles seemed vulnerable, every blow aching.

Bruce Willis was a deadly action hero.

A hopeless loser.

Perhaps because of this unfortunate aura, three years later the press rushed to decree the end of his career.

The failures of

(1990),

(1991) and, above all,

(1991, co-written by Willis himself) seemed to show that the success of

and its sequel had It was two strokes of luck.

The actor developed a paranoid animus towards the press, which he claimed were hell-bent on bringing him down.

"There's so much competition that you can see how many people want to see you fail," he said.

Although this neurosis hurt him (he sat in all the interviews on the defensive) he had reason to believe that the press had taken a liking to him.

Journalists described him as "a star who eats with his hands" or "an actor who has made a fortune because Hollywood has become a corporation."

So Willis opted to, as

magazine described in 1999, "go into interviews without his personality."

's public image

and, incidentally, to make sure he didn't stutter.

Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Willis and Maria de Meideros presenting 'Pulp Fiction' in Cannes.Pool BENAINOUS/DUCLOS (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

The resurrection of his career came in 1994, when Quentin Tarantino cast him as a boxer in

in which, in a prophecy of his current career, he accepted an envelope full of money in exchange for being defeated in a match.

However,

also inaugurated a pattern in Bruce Willis's career: even when it was successful, the press focused on other aspects of the film.

In this case, his resurrection narrative was overshadowed by John Travolta's.

In the same way, five years later, before the phenomenon of

(1999), the media conversation focused on the discoveries of M. Night Shyamalan and Haley Joel Osment.

It seemed that

it was a great movie in spite of Willis, not because of him.

What really jump-started Willis's career was the third part of

and

, the highest-grossing films of 1995 and 1998, respectively.

And that confirmed that the only thing the public wanted from Bruce Willis was for him to play

.

He had to hide that he longed for critical respect, that he had artistic interests or that he wanted to show versatility as an actor.

In fact, he is one of the actors with the most varied filmography in Hollywood: in a matter of five years, he played the pusillanimous surgeon in

(1992), the imaginary friend dressed as an Easter bunny in

(1994 ), as a gangster in

(1996, Walter Hill's remake of

set in the 1930s), as a madman nobody believes in

(1995) or as a used car salesman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in

(1999) .

He even played himself parodic in

(1993).

On none of these projects was he the first choice for the director.

He had to fight to get them and reduce his salary to the minimum.

Perhaps from so much pretending that everything did not matter to him, Bruce Willis has ended up giving him everything the same.

After all, the films he makes now only exist for the people who see them.

And as Michael Caine explained when asked about his participation in

(1987), another film with 0 points on Rotten Tomatoes: “It's terrible, although he's never actually seen it.

What I have seen is the house on the beach that I bought with my salary.

And it's magnificent."

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