Don’t you hate the awkward silence that happens when someone has been recast as your favorite movie character?
No explanation. No plot twist is given in which your character returns to save the day and thwarts the impostor.
Instead, you just have to deal with it and accept New Guy Here as the recast hero.
Sometimes, the awkward silence is unbearable, and you hate the rest of the movie because of this terrible choice of recasting.
But sometimes, they get it right, and we’re all forced to begrudgingly agree that this new interpretation of our favorite character was brilliant.
Not all 11 performances were brilliant. However, when the recasting was first announced, each one divided moviegoers. Let’s consider each one and whether the recast was a WIN or FAIL.
9. Will Smith in Aladdin – WIN
Will Smith wasn’t the first black actor cast in a new Disney project. Ariel’s Little Mermaid started an even bigger buzz online.
But let’s just agree to say the Ariel character was not exactly a Shakespearean undertaking when it comes to deep character study.
Robin Williams’ Genie, on the other hand, left behind some big boots to fill.
Not only was Robin Williams’ improvised comedy a tour-de-force but Genie was already recast once before when Williams left Disney, only to be replaced by Dan Castellaneta.
Will Smith had to follow in two Genies’ footsteps while trying to find a creative angle to a story that had been repeated verbatim by Disney fans.
Of all the lazy and emotionally vacant Disney remakes, I found Aladdin (2019) to be the most charming of the bunch. I also thought Will Smith carried the ball and chain of replacing a comedy legend with class and good cheer.
Come to think of it I haven’t seen Will Smith as happy as he was in Aladdin in quite a while.
Better times, Will.
8. Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight – WIN
Isn’t following Jack Nicholson the worst job an actor could sign up for?
Jack Nicholson was lauded as the perfect choice for Joker in Batman (1989) based on his previous body of work and naturally acerbic personality — and that’s even before the movie opened.
No wonder, then, when Heath Ledger was announced as the next Joker, the fandom fell silent. He wasn’t just a character actor. He was a pretty boy, a rising star with everything to lose.
Ledger didn’t even benefit from a bad boy reputation going into the film like Joaquin Phoenix did when he got his sweaty hands on the role.
Heath Ledger didn’t just give a good Joker performance. He redefined the villain’s role for a new age and seemed to embody the angry Gen X-Millennial voice we needed.
Years after his untimely death, Heath’s madcap performance remains the talk of Hollywood in terms of brilliance and dangerous method acting that we never want to try again.
7. Robert Downey Jr. in Avengers: Doomsday – ALREADY A WIN
I know, it feels like Doctor Doom hasn’t even debuted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but unfortunately, he has come and gone.
He debuted not just once but twice in two god-awful performances by Julian McMahon and Toby Kebbell in two Fantastic Four movies.
By the time the Russo Brothers announced Robert Downey Jr. as the next Doom, the fandom had all but forgotten Doom’s two debuts.
We’ve reached the point where we can safely ignore Doom’s previous appearances and just pretend like they never happened.
What really started the controversy, though, was the ingenious decision to cast Iron Man legend Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom and poke the Marvel Universe all over the chest with panic and unanswered questions.
At this point, it feels like the high concept will outdo the movie itself. But the Russos are Hollywood’s most creative superhero filmmakers, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. They have years to figure this climax out.
6. Mads Mikkelsen in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore – FAIL
When Johnny Depp lost his 2020 libel case against The Sun magazine, he was the scourge of Hollywood and was #MeToo’d out of town.
He had little choice but to resign from Fantastic Beasts and bow out to Mads Mikkelsen to take the role of Gellert Grindelwald.
Johnny Depp was paid handsomely regardless of the scandal. But his reputation would be pummeled in a no-holds-barred courtroom battle against ex-wife Amber Heard, who was herself later vilified by the press for comparably terrible behavior.
If only classy author J.K. Rowling could have talked to these raging egos and explained the benefits of showing grace and restraint while under pressure…
Oh, wait.
Come to think of it, nobody benefited from Fantastic Beasts in the end. Let’s just pretend this debacle never happened.
5. Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo in The Hulk – FAIL
Here we have not just one but two controversial recastings that ruffled feathers in Hollywood, all thanks to the ever-fluctuating Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In fact, this universe has had so many reboots, recasts, and multi-verse resets that we can hardly keep up. We just know the Hulk is big, angry, and green! And his human Bruce Banner character is hardly important.
Eric Bana was the first Hulk in Hulk (2003), surprisingly directed by superstar talent Ang Lee.
Yet, the film was considered an artsy flop, and by the time The Incredible Hulk (2008) came out, Norton had replaced Bana in what was a no-brainer decision: a cerebral Hulk played by an Oscar-nominated actor!
Yet the movie was also a bit of a flop, though in Norton’s defense, allegedly 70 minutes was cut from the film we saw.
Norton took the inevitable recasting worse than Bana and had a bitter falling out with Marvel over the creative direction of the Hulk character.
When Kevin Feige took over Marvel projects, he not so subtly said they wanted a Hulk actor who got along with the cast and was excited to take the part. That didn’t reflect well on Edward Norton, who was already upset about how his film was handled.
And forget any heavy acting moments for this new Hulk. Time time, Feige was all about giving us the comic relief Hulk that one-dimensional actor Mark Ruffalo was born to play.
Norton’s PR team later suggested Feige’s words were defamatory toward Norton’s work ethic, and they indeed made him very angry.
And no one likes Norton when he’s angry, or so I’ve heard.
4. Crispin Glover and Jeffrey Weissman in Back to the Future – FAIL
Notorious actor and performance actor Crispin Glover was all set to return to Back to the Future II and III but was never able to agree to payment, nor did he approve of the film’s message.
Robert Zemeckis was stuck finishing the film without a major supporting player. The CGI-curious Zemeckis came up with a solution.
Instead of writing George McFly out of the film entirely, couldn’t they just recast Crispin Glover for key scenes while also using previously recorded footage of Crispin Glover?
Yes, Crispin was replaced by Jeffrey Weissman (who wore prosthetics to get Crispin’s weird face down) and…Crispin Glover, oddly enough.
No wonder he took the producers of Back to the Future to court, saying they used his likeness without his permission.
They never went to trial, but an agreement was reached — and how about the aftershocks of that case? There are now clauses in Screen Actors Guild contracts barring filmmakers from reproducing the likeness of other actors.
Turns out George McFly can throw a punch after all.
3. Julianne Moore in Hannibal – FAIL
It’s difficult for casual moviegoers to understand the subtle differences between great Hollywood directors.
Jonathan Demme knew how to make an Oscar-winning film from The Silence of the Lambs novel. He knew just how to use Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster to make dangerous movie chemistry.
Ridley Scott didn’t know what the hell he was doing with Hannibal and made the bogus decision to recast the vacuous Julianne Moore as Clarice Starling.
Even if you had to do the unthinkable and replace the incomparable Jodie Foster (who turned the sequel down), how did you settle on Moore — an actor who only succeeds by playing blank, morally absent, and heavily inebriated characters time and time again?
This was not Clarice Starling. This was someone else, and Anthony Hopkins was acting against a beautiful piece of scenery — not an actor that could match his gravitas.
Hannibal sequels only got worse until Hopkins himself left the project.
Here’s a case study on how to ruin an Oscar-winning franchise with just one bad sequel.
2. Henry Cavill in Superman – WIN & David Corenswet in Superman – TBD
Granted, you have to try pretty hard to mess up Superman.
No previous Superman recasting was particularly controversial because all of the actors from the 70s to the 90s generally had the look, the wholesome humor, and the All-American face we wanted.
The brooding Henry Cavill was a bold choice for recasting the Man of Steel, and director Zack Snyder took a big creative risk in reimagining Superman for the 2010s.
Snyder was the first director to explore a different side to Superman, something other than aww-shucks-white-altruism.
His Superman was inhuman. His Superman was god-like and alien in his behavior. This was quite literally the morally ambiguous performance that allowed Homelander from The Boys to thrive later on.
It was a risky move for sure and to be fair, most audiences didn’t care for it.
Snyder fans, who are always in love with the dark cinematic paintings Snyder creates, loved the performance.
James Gunn, the perpetually-fifteen Marvel fanboy, hated it along with most of Marvel’s fandom.
They wanted Super StraightMan back, the comic relief guy, the boy with glasses who would rather fight bad guys than go on a date with his crush.
The shtick worked for Captain America in the Avengers movies, and Chris Evans made Steve Rogers both funny and heroic without missing a beat.
But James Gunn is mostly untested when it comes to handling alien superheroes as leads and not as antagonists.
All of James Gunn’s films are burlesque shows with over-the-top CGI assault and just a handful of feelings to explain why all the violence was necessary.
No doubt he will turn the Superman/Justice League franchise in another direction. More humor, a comparable number of visual effects shots, and hopefully some gripping conflict, which he handled well in Guardians of the Galaxy.
But what will he do with the New Superman, played by David Corenswet, an iconic figure who is out of touch with Zillennials, and who needs a reinvention to keep the DCU relevant?
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because Guardians of the Galaxy was a big hit when taken in small doses.
The Suicide Squad (2021) was an overdose of gross-out humor and surrealist pop art.
He’s a director who will elicit either love or hate from DC’s fandom.
Let’s take a deep breath and see what happens. I’ve heard Superman can reverse time if it’s THAT big a mistake…
1. Michael Keaton in Batman – WIN
One cannot fathom how controversial recasting Michael Keaton as Batman was until you read about the climate of the late nineteen-eighties.
There in about 1988, a young Tim Burton stared up at a Gotham skyscraper, trying to figure out how to tell a darker and more realistic Batman story that moviegoers had never seen before.
This thankless task happened in a post-Adam West world, where Batman’s reputation was cemented as a poker-faced, pun-spinning, and avuncular hero.
No one was afraid of Batman, they respected him as the groovy father they never had.
Burton had no choice but to reimagine the superhero concept from a different angle other than heroism.
He certainly had some help from literary writers like Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison, who had already been telling darker Batman stories to comic book fans.
Burton also came up with the shrewd idea of staging Batman as a moving, breathing art exhibit — a celebration of anarchy, childhood trauma, and a sociopathic fashion show.
But the true stroke of genius came from recasting an underappreciated character actor INSTEAD of a musclebound hero who would sell tickets.
Keaton’s previous performances were manically captivating, whether he was playing for laughs in Beetlejuice or tugging at heartstrings in Clean and Sober.
What Keaton would bring to Batman was a question not even Vic Sage could answer.
Neither Keaton nor Burton ever thought about giving us the Batman we wanted.
This Batman was something uncomfortable, impenetrable, and tortured. Keaton was the first hero who wanted us to see his frailties as a man and his strength as a costumed hero.
His performance may well have been the first understated superhero role and perhaps the first time any superhero actor went “method.”
It was frankly the only way he could play opposite Jack Nicholson, who had decided to chew scenery no matter what anyone threw at him.
Keaton reinvented Batman for the modern age by creating a strong internal identity that you could see and hear on screen. For once, we could see how Bruce Wayne WAS just as insane as all of the villains he locked up in Arkham Asylum.
He needed Batman more than we needed him as a hero. That was the revelation that Batman’s best comic writers of the 1980s impressed upon Tim Burton.
No wonder Michael Keaton still polls as the “best Batman ever” because he showed a generation of wannabe heroes how to fight the evil inside ourselves before taking on that crazy clown.
What do you think? What recastings do you think deserve to be on the list of Best or Worst recastings ever?
