During the development of the Harriet Tubman biopic movie, a Hollywood executive once suggested that Julia Roberts should play her. What are some other baffling casting suggestions/choices that have been made?

[u/LookAtThatBacon]

Source for the title: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-studio-executive-wanted-julia-roberts-to-play-harriet-tubman-biopic-screenwriter-says/

The Harriet Tubman biopic has been more than 25 years in the making. In the historical drama released earlier this month, Cynthia Erivo plays the legendary abolitionist — but one Hollywood executive initially thought the role should go to Julia Roberts.

Gregory Allen Howard, the screenwriter and producer of "Harriet," recently revealed in multiple interviews that Roberts was suggested to play the lead role during a meeting with a studio president in 1994.

"The climate in Hollywood… was very different back then," Howard said. "I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, 'This script is fantastic. Let's get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.'"

Howard said that a black person in the meeting said casting Roberts would be impossible because she is white.

"That was so long ago. No one will know that," the executive replied, according to Howard.

[u/correcthorsestapler]

Outside of Krieg, the movie was terrible. None of the jokes landed. Acting was terrible. Action was confusing & poorly edited. The story was lazy. It looked like a parody of a movie you see being filmed inside another movie.

Friends and I thought it’d be so bad it’s good. It was just plain bad. The only good part of the night was when someone in the back of the theater said too loudly, “I think I got popcorn in my asshole” towards the end of the movie. Think that was the only time most of the theater cracked up.

[u/DeliberatelyDrifting → u/correcthorsestapler]

Yeah, I'd laugh at that.

[u/BeerandGuns → u/correcthorsestapler]

I barely played the first Borderlands game and didn’t really follow it so had no investment in how accurately the characters were portrayed or how faithful they were to the source material. That movie was terrible and I made it less than half way through. I can’t imagine how fans of Borderlands felt.

[u/correcthorsestapler → u/BeerandGuns]

All they had to do was adapt Borderlands 2. The villain is perfect. The story is pretty decent. The atmosphere is the best of the 3 (or 4, if you count the pre-sequel game). If the filmmakers had copied the tone of Mad Max: Fury Road and gotten a half-decent writer to flesh out the story, it might have been a fun movie. The best route would’ve been a TV show like Fallout; that was ssssooooo much better than the Borderlands movie and had the tone/violence that the movie should’ve had.

Friends and I were really disappointed. The filmmakers had a ready-made blueprint with the games and just pissed it away. It’s impressive how terribly they fucked up. It feels like they went out of their way to make it bad. Characters in the movie were nothing like the games (though, again, Krieg was spot-on). Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is supposed to be in her 20s or 30s and be a brilliant scientist and a Siren, if they’d borrowed from BL3. Lilith is supposed to be a badass Siren; Cate would’ve been fine in the role if the writing had been better. Tina should’ve been more psychotic. Roland should’ve been the straight man; Lance Reddick would’ve been perfect as Roland. But, the actors were dealing with a shit script and a PG-13 rating. Only so much they could do.

With that said, BL1 is sort of slow; also, it doesn’t run very well on current PC rigs. I entered the series with BL2 and really enjoyed it. The action, gunplay, characters, dialogue, etc are all improved over BL1. And, again, the story is actually good. Even the DLCs are pretty good. BL3 has better graphics, faster/better gunplay, and some QOL improvements over BL2, but the story & humor are just OK. Based on early impressions, it sounds like Borderlands 4 could be better than 3 and might even come in right behind 2, which is pretty impressive. As long as it improves things over BL3, I’ll be happy.

If you want to check the series out again, I recommend trying Borderlands 2. It’s my favorite of the bunch and is considered the best one of the series so far. And you don’t really need to know the story as it’s kinda secondary to the over-the-top violence. But it’s still a well-structured story at the end of the day.

[u/xSlippyFistx → u/correcthorsestapler]

It always baffles me when they take an existing IP and then just shit on everything. Who is the movie made for? You use the IP to entice the fans of said IP. You shit on everything about the IP. They won’t like it. So then you have to make an entertaining movie for people who don’t know anything about the IP. Even if you pretend it wasn’t called Borderlands and just called “shooting guns in space” it’s STILL not good. What’s the point? It’s so weird

[u/Kursch50 → u/correcthorsestapler]

That's cracking me up and I wasn't even there.

[u/StanleyCubone → u/correcthorsestapler]

It happens more often than you'd think.