2004 was year of epic flops, super sequels, and sleeper hits
Yahoo looks back on the cinematic summer of twenty years ago
2024 marks 20 years since the summer blockbuster season of 2004. It was a year when the superhero genre was still in its infancy, CG animation was just finding its feet, biopics were all the rage, and disaster movies were on their way out.
It was also the year that Return of the King swept the Oscars on behalf of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 stoked controversy, and Mel Gibson scored an unlikely hit with The Passion of the Christ.
Join us as we travel back to the cinematic summer of 20 years past.
The Notebook puts Ryan Gosling on the map
There’s nothing Hollywood likes more than a sleeper hit and the beginning of the summer season 20 years ago served up exactly that. The movie adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ epic romance novel The Notebook had been bubbling around since the book’s publication in 1996 with everyone from Justin Timberlake to Tom Cruise attached at one point.
But it wasn’t until up-and-coming actor Ryan Gosling and fellow Canadian Rachel McAdams came together under the direction of Nick Cassavetes that it was fully-realised.
Read more: Flashback
Gosling at the time wasn’t sure why he had been cast. “Why me?” he told Australia’s Courier Mail later in the year. “I don’t look like a dreamboat.” That’s exactly why he got the job. Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Biel and Britney Spears all auditioned to play the female lead, but it was Mean Girls star Rachel McAdams — actually born in the same hospital as Gosling — who got the role.
Unfortunately, even though the end result demonstrated their on-screen chemistry, off-camera neither actor saw eye to eye. “They were really not getting along one day on set. Really not,” Cassavetes told VH1. “We went into a room with a producer. They started screaming and yelling at each other. I walked out. At that point I was smoking cigarettes. I smoked a cigarette and everybody came out like, ‘Alright, let’s do this.’ And it got better after that, you know?”
Two big sequels
Shrek 2 hit UK cinemas on 2 July and immediately became another box office smash, while anticipation was running wild for Sam Raimi’s follow-up to 2002’s Spider-Man.
And looking back on it now, there’s evidence to suggest Spider-Man 2 might be one of the best sequels ever made, let alone superhero movie. Raimi worked on the script for 18 months with award-winning novelist Michael Chabon amongst others, but truly making it sing was Alfred Molina, playing a tortured, genuinely nuanced villain so rare in movies of this magnitude.
Doctor Octopus, aka Doc Ock, was the real star of Spider-Man 2. It was a change of pace for the character actor. “At the height of summer we’d do part of a scene with the first unit and then rush to the second unit and then rush to the third,” he told Entertainment Weekly just before the film’s release. “We were all rushing around like blue-arsed flies.”
Michael Moore causes a political storm
Documentarian Michael Moore had been holding power to account for several years, but Fahrenheit 9/11, which would win the 2004 Palme D’Or at Cannes, was his most polemical film yet, eviscerating George W Bush’s US government and the war on terror.
Miramax set up a brand-new shingle to distribute the film after their parent company Disney refused to release it. It also made Moore public enemy number one for the right-wing, called a “demagogue”, “anti-American” and a liar.
The latter charge was something Moore faced regularly once the film came out, with opponents suggesting he massaged truths around certain facts. “The movie clearly gives the impression that a lot of Saudis were allowed to flee the country, to fly out of the country at a time when nobody else could, because of the political influence that the Saudis have with the White House and that they weren't adequately vetted by the FBI,” journalist Michael Isikoff told CNN. "This is in some cases flat-out wrong.”
Nevertheless, it remains one of the most politically-significant documentaries ever made and would go on to earn almost ￡180million worldwide, the most successful doc in history by an extraordinary margin at the time.
Some epic flops
If producers had had their way originally, Nicole Kidman would have starred in two of the biggest failures of 2004. She was offered the role of Catwoman before Halle Berry signed up, but instead she headlined director Frank Oz’s remake of The Stepford Wives, alongside Matthew Broderick and singer Faith Hill.
The making of Wives proved to be a nightmare. “It went completely awry,” Kidman said a year later. “That was not my happiest experience, put it that way. It wasn’t joyful.”
Production went over-schedule, endings were changed, large reshoots undertaken. Kidman had already begun working on a new movie, necessitating Stepford wigs. To his credit, Oz took a lot of the blame on himself. In an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, he said, “I had a very strong viewpoint to do the movie, but I didn’t expect such huge stars. When the stars came, everything kind of ballooned up. My original instincts were to make it more intimate.”
It was likely Halle Berry’s fresh spin on a traditional Bond girl in Die Another Day that convinced producers she was the right fit to play Catwoman in a standalone film. “I’m trying to get my purr just right,” she said beforehand, adding, “Catwoman’s been done by some great women and I’m just hoping I can stand among them and add some of my own personality.”
Sadly, the film was dead on arrival. Berry took it all in her stride however, even showing up to collect her Razzie Award for Worst Actress the following year. Her faux-teary speech is legendary. Selina Kyle’s feline alter-ego wasn’t the only iconic character who got a big-screen outing of their own in 2004.
Thunderbirds had been in development for a while, with takes as varied as an all-CGI animated film to the Baldwin brothers playing the Tracys, with Rowan Atkinson as Brains.
In their infinite wisdom, filmmakers decided to make it more ‘youthful’, hiring a bunch of young unknowns — among them Dominic Colenso, Philip Winchester and Brady Corbet — to play the heroes, with Bill Paxton as their dad, Ben Kingsley as the baddie and Sophia Myles as Lady Penelope.
Directed by former Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Jonathan Frakes, the result was what Thunderbirds’ original creator Gerry Anderson called… well, let’s just say he wasn’t a fan.
The film was a box office bomb, causing consternation at the movie’s production house Working Title. “No-one at the company had anticipated anything other than that Thunderbirds would be a smash hit,” an anonymous source told The Evening Standard. “As a result some Working Title employees are acting like headless chickens at the moment.”
The passing of a Godfather legend
The rest of 2004 would see future meme-worthy fare like Anchorman, Napoleon Dynamite and Team America: World Police released, but Hollywood paused on 1 July to remember one of the greats.
Marlon Brando died at the age of 80 in Los Angeles, causing a wave of tributes from his collaborator Francis Ford Coppola to the US President.
“Simply put, in film acting, there is before Brando and there is after Brando,” said the New York Times. “And they are like different worlds.”
The Oscar-winning star of On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Superman, Apocalypse Now and The Godfather had become something of a recluse in later life. He certainly suffered more than his fair share of tragedy; his daughter and third wife killed themselves, his son was convicted of killing his daughter’s abusive fiancé. Biographers suggested he was millions in debt and he was reduced to taking high-paying cameo gigs.
Still, the genius was undeniable. As Coppola said, “Marlon would hate the idea of people chiming in to give their comments about his death. All I’ll say is that it makes me sad he’s gone.”
