WTF Happened To....?!

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Julia Roberts was one of the dominant Hollywood stars for a good twenty-year period. From her breakout role in 1988’s Mystic Pizza, Roberts skyrocketed to the top of the A-list when she starred opposite Richard Gere in Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman. An unlikely Cinderella story about an escort that falls in love with a high-powered executive, it’s a movie that is definitely a Hollywood fairytale, but one that a lot of people loved in 1990, with it being one of the year’s top-grossing movies. From there, Roberts made a string of hits, including Flatliners, The Pelican Brief, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill and many more, but respect in more heavy vehicles eluded her. Movies like Mary Reilly and Michael Collins were embarrassing for how miscast she was, and for awhile, it looked like she would be stuck doing lightweight but highly profitable rom coms.

However, that changed in 2000 when she played the lead in Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich. Based on a true story, the movie finally won her the Academy Award that had long eluded her. It earned her serious cred, and her fame took on a whole new dimension, with roles in Oceans’ Eleven, Mona Lisa Smile and Eat Pray Love all big successes. Yet, as the business began to change, emphasizing tentpole movies, Roberts seemed to struggle more than contemporaries like Sandra Bullock to find her place. Eventually, she made a move into TV Prime Video’s Homecoming. Still, it’s notable how low-key the release of a show like Gaslit was despite the names involved. There was a time when Julia Roberts doing a TV series would have been an event. 

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!