Gerard Butler does not have to worry about his career these days. Even though the quality of his films varies greatly, audiences and critics often agree that he has Niche as an action star in Hollywood However, a look back at his filmography shows that this was not always the case.
20 years ago, Butler appeared in the musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Directed by Joel Schumacher, he played the title role: a phantom who wreaks havoc in the depths of an opera house and seduces the young Christine (Emmy Rossum) with his music. The film was only released with little enthusiasm recorded.
Before his career as an action star: Gerard Butler had to endure a lot of criticism for The Phantom of the Opera
At Metacritic, The Phantom of the Opera has an average score of 40 out of 100 points from 39 reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes score is even more bitter, with only 33 percent of 169 reviews being positive. One point of criticism that keeps cropping up is the Casting of Butler as a phantom.
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Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera
The Baltimore Sun (via Metacritic) came to a devastating conclusion:
In Schumacher’s relentlessly arrhythmic and toneless film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he had just Monty Python’s Lumberjack Choir sprung from.
On Reddit, a fan of the musical template sums up the problem as follows:
I just can’t understand how anyone who has heard the role sung properly (either the recordings with the original cast, the stage musical or the 25th anniversary) can think his performance was good. Objectively speaking, his voice is not great. He screams a lot of his text and struggles to hit the more difficult notes. Even the creator of the musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber, was not a fan of Gerard Butler’s phantom casting
The Phantom of the Opera would haunt Butler for quite some time. The hardest defeat came just three years ago. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Creator of the musicalswho also served as producer and co-writer of the film adaptation, described the casting to Variety as a mistake – and blamed it on director Schumacher.
Webber also explained why the casting didn’t work in his eyes:
[Gerard Butlers] phantom was too young and the key point about the Phantom is that it must be much older than Christine. Ultimately, Butler did not let all the criticism get him down, but continued to tried out different rolesfrom romantic comedies to fantasy epics to sci-fi thrillers. It is now clear in which roles the audience likes to see him most: as the rough action hero.