“Alice Through the Looking Glass’’ may have flopped amid Amber Heard’s accusations of spousal abuse, but Johnny Depp’s multimillion-dollar paydays aren’t going to end anytime soon.
All Hollywood cares about is money. If audiences turn out in droves for a star in at least some of his expensive movies, the work will keep coming.
Audiences seem to forget scandals. Even a pariah like Mel Gibson was able to land a spot among the over-the-hill action heroes in the last “Expendables’’ installment. If some producers thought they could make money with a buddy comedy teaming Bill Cosby and O.J. Simpson, that might just happen.
Depp’s career has spiraled down with box-office disasters of varying magnitude in the past four years (2015’s “Mortdecai,’’ 2014’s “Transcendence,’’ 2013’s “The Lone Ranger’’ and 2012’s “Dark Shadows’’). At best, his critically overpraised comeback “Black Mass’’ probably broke even last year.
But Tinseltown will forgive everything if the fifth installment of his “Pirates of the Caribbean’’ — which is already in the can — connects with audiences in a major way a year from now. Also helping with future alimony payments is Depp’s undoubtedly lucrative contract to front an “Invisible Man’’ remake due in 2018, even as the dubious “Thin Man’’ reimagining he’s attached to apparently remains in development.
There was ample reason to expect the “Alice’’ sequel to disappoint at the ticket windows even before Heard’s well-timed bombshell arrived just ahead of the holiday weekend. (The actual drop from the original’s opening weekend turned out to be a record $89 million. In all fairness, the first “Alice’’ opened on a much less competitive March weekend where it wasn’t facing this May’s “X-Men’’ sequel, which also underperformed expectations but nowhere near as dramatically as “Alice.’’)
For starters, nobody really loved the original “Alice,’’ which sold a huge portion of its tickets with lucrative 3-D surcharges after the massively successful “Avatar” was released three months earlier in December 2009.
Second, a six-year wait for a sequel is an eternity for a family flick (next year’s “Pirates’’ reboot faces the same challenge). The 12-year-old girls who flocked to the first “Alice’’ are legally adults now, and their tastes have moved on. Based on the recent flop of the “Snow White’’ sequel “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,’’ pretty much everyone seems to have wearied of the revisionist classic fantasy genre.
“Alice Through the Looking Glass’’ wasn’t helped by the absence of director Tim Burton — arguably a bigger draw than Depp, who has a supporting role as the Mad Hatter in both films — and generally murderous reviews.
So Depp won’t get blamed for this one by the money men, even if Heard seemed happy about the film’s flop over the weekend. I have no idea whether her serious accusations are true, but it’s worth noting that all Team Amber has to look forward to besides court appearances are her participation in an indie ensemble comedy and supporting roles as Aquaman’s wife in a pair of comic-book movies.
One of these indies, “London Fields,’’ is an adaptation of a Martin Amis thriller with Heard in the lead and Depp in a “mercifully brief’’ cameo (as one of two scathing reviews described it) and was pulled from 2015’s Toronto International Film Festival amid a legal dispute between its producers. It currently does not have a US release date.
Will Depp survive Heard’s accusations? Just ask Woody Allen, who has continued to churn out films on an annual basis while ignoring career obituaries written at regular intervals over the past quarter-century.
