When Brendan Fraser received the Oscar as the best leading actor for his haunting performance in The Whale in 2023, one of the most emotional Hollywood comeback in recent years was perfect. For a long time before, the actor spent a existence far below the status of an A-Lister-which mostly had to do with the sexual harassment he had experienced, which was turned under the carpet for years.
In the past, Fraser was at the top of the success: the adventure film the Mummy became the surprise hit of the year in 1999 and made the then 30-year-old worldwide popular action star. But only two years later he had to take a career setback, which luckily is almost forgotten today. This was to blame for a film with one lustful comic monkeys …
Brendan Frasers Fantasy comedy Monkeybone became a disaster shortly after his success with the mummy
In 2001 Fraser took over the fateful leading role in Monkeybone. The plot of the weird fantasy comedy reads like the fever dream of a dehydrated Kafka admirer.
That’s what it’s about in Monkeybone: The cartoonist Stu Miley (Fraser) suffering from great self-doubt celebrates an unexpected success with the comic character Monkeybone, which he created in the original spoken by John Turturro), a brazen and large-mouthed monkey. However, he cannot enjoy it for long, because after an accident he falls into a coma in a telephone booth (!).
His awareness then comes into a kind of curve called Down Town, in which he meets the most absurd fantasy creatures. Also present is his own creation Monkeybone, who is a stus friend, but does not keep anything good. The sex -obsessed monkey wants to take over the body in the real world and leave his creator behind in Down Town.
The mixture of live action and stop-motion animated film settled somewhere between Beetlejuice and Space Jam, but failed economically and qualitatively miserably. With a budget of $ 75 million, Monkeybone played just over 7.5 million worldwide, can be read at Box Office Mojo and, according to Watch Mojo, became one of the biggest comedy cinema flops in film history.
The criticism also brings the fantasy strip. For example, Common Sense Media wrote: “Starts bad and then gets worse.” One Average rating of 4.9 points In the case of 147 voting on the Moviepilot community so far, there is also no high appreciation. No wonder that Monkeybone has now been practically forgotten, although it is even still in it many more stars Like Whoopi Goldberg, Bridget Fonda, Giancarlo Esposito and Rose McGowan strayed.
Brendan Fraser held Monkeybone for the “The most expensive art house film”
But what does leading actor Fraser say about the fiasco called Monkeybone today? With a Q&A in April 2022, he was explicitly asked for the film and remembered his impression of back then:
Monkeybone was on paper […] The most expensive arthouse film that 20th Century Fox had ever produced because they swam in the money for Titanic. So they gave [Regisseur] Henry Selick, who is animator and has a fantastic imagination, all this money and full support. They left him completely free. What you see on the canvas is just handmade and overturned.
That does not necessarily sound like bitter or remorse from Frasers. There is even a certain one between the lines of his statement Respect for the creative vision of Selicks read out.
After all, Henry Selick is the maker of stop-motion master plants such as Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. For Monkeybone, however, he had to bow to the will of the studio that actually even darker -supposed to make a family comedySelick revealed in an interview with Double Toasted from 2022. His dissatisfaction with the end product ultimately led to his decision not to stage a live action film in the future.
Fraser himself could certainly cope with the failure of Monkeybone at the time, after all, in the same year that the mummy sequel returned the mummy, which became one of the most successful films of the year in 2001.
Where can you find Monkeybone with Brendan Fraser in the stream?
The Fantasy comedy Monkeybone is currently not available in a streaming flat rate. If you still feel like a trash film evening with Brendan Fraser, you can buy or borrow the film from Amazon Prime Video.