We've all had the urge, when looking at an ad for an obviously stupid movie, to shout to the heavens, "Who thought this was a good idea?"
That impulse is incredibly strong when contemplating "The Emoji Movie," the animated feature about life inside the world of your smartphone. Sony Pictures chose not to show it to critics (a less-than-promising sign) before its nationwide opening Friday.
Hollywood is littered with movies that weren't just poorly executed, but seemed to be ill-conceived from the get-go. Here are seven movies that have made movie lovers wonder what the makers were thinking.
1. "The Conquerer" (1956)
White actors playing Asians didn't start recently with Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson in "Aloha" and "Ghost in the Shell," respectively. It reached its ridiculous peak when John Wayne was cast as the Mongol chieftain Genghis Khan, battling Tartar armies for the love of the Tartar princess Bortai (Susan Hayward). The movie, produced by Howard Hughes and directed by actor and hoofer Dick Powell, was famous for awful dialogue — "You're beautiful in your wrath," Duke's Genghis tells Hayward's Bortai — and for its tragic backstory: After filming around St. George, while nuclear-bomb tests were happening in nearby Nevada, a significant number of the movie's cast and crew later died of cancer.
2. "Howard the Duck" (1986)
Marvel's comic-book character, a sarcastic anthropomorphic duck taken from his planet and plopped in the Everglades, made for funny social satire in the 1970s. Making him the center of a blockbuster movie, with the hapless Howard befriended by a budding rock star (Lea Thompson), was one of the many missteps producer George Lucas made in his wilderness years between the original "Star Wars" trilogy and the prequels.
3. "The Avengers" (1998)
For Anglophiles, the name "The Avengers" prompts memories not of Marvel's superhero jam session but of the delightfully dotty '60s spy adventure series, with urbane secret agent John Steed (Patrick MacNee) and his smart, sexy "amateur" partner, Emma Peel (Diana Rigg), battling threats to Her Majesty's Secret Service. It was a given that Hollywood filmmakers would never be able to bottle the quirky English charm of the original. The severe miscasting — with a pre-Voldemort Ralph Fiennes as Steed and a pre-"Kill Bill" Uma Thurman as Mrs. Peel, and a pre-retirement Sean Connery chewing scenery as a weather-controlling villain — was only the tip of an iceberg of bad decisions.
4. "From Justin to Kelly" (2003)
Producers thought it would be a hoot, and a great marketing tie-in, to have the first- and second-place winners of "American Idol's" first season star in a beach-party musical romance. They did this without reckoning on "Idol" champ Kelly Clarkson's first-time acting jitters, runner-up Justin Guarini's lack of screen presence, or the vapidity of the script and musical numbers.
5. "Tiptoes" (2004)
Matthew Bright was once a Sundance Film Festival darling after debuting his 1996 dark comedy "Freeway," which put a teenage Reese Witherspoon and a leering Kiefer Sutherland in a bloody Little Red Riding Hood scenario. Bright returned to Park City in 2004 with "Tiptoes," which had the weirdest premise ever: Perfect couple Carol (Kate Beckinsale) and Steve (Matthew McConaughey) are about to have a baby, which forces Steve to reveal a family secret — his parents and his twin brother, Rolfe (Gary Oldman), are little people, a genetic trait that might transfer to their baby. Yes, it's as jaw-droppingly awful as it sounds, even with Peter Dinklage's turn as Rolfe's lascivious French-Canadian buddy (who has a sex scene with Patricia Arquette). The movie went straight to DVD, and Bright (who was reportedly fired by the producers during post-production) never directed again.
6. "Jack and Jill" (2011)
Most Adam Sandler movies have lazy concepts, but this one was both lazy and cringeworthy: Sandler playing his usual regular-guy character and also playing that character's annoying sister. The only people in America who think Sandler in drag is actually funny were the ones he paid to work on the movie with him — which included Al Pacino, portraying himself and looking for all the world like he'd rather be anywhere else.
7. "The Angry Birds Movie" (2016)
When a company has a recognizable intellectual property — such as a mobile-phone game in which fowl are hurled by slingshot into poorly constructed pig domiciles — it's apparently impossible to derail the moviemaking apparatus with things like thought or good sense. One imagines the elevator pitch: "Hey, you know that game you play on the phone while you're pooping? Let's get people to pay nine bucks to see those same birds in a movie theater!" ("The Angry Birds Movie" was released by the same studio, Sony/Columbia, that is putting out "The Emoji Movie.")
