Awful Cash Grabs Starring Talented Actors

Acting is a job. Sometimes your job grants you emotional and intellectual fulfillment, challenging you to the core, and making you glad to be alive. Other times, you're rapping and dancing in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial for something called the "Dunkaccino." Simply put, some jobs are good, while others are done purely for the money. Here's but a small sampling of some of Hollywood's most talented actors and the terrible movies they've appeared in so they can buy new boats.

Back in 2004, some brilliant movie execs decided that the world had waited long enough. It was time for a movie about Garfield, the orange cat who eats lasagna and also sometimes sticks to car windows. While making a movie out of a faded intellectual property isn't so odd in Hollywood, the fact that legendary funnyman Bill Murray provided the cat's voice is truly insane. It's so ridiculous, that during an interview with Garfield star Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jon Stewart spoke the truth: "Bill Murray must be some kind of crazy whore for money right now."

In many ways, Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to his roots as a sociopathic murder-robot actually feels like one of the most authentic things the actor has done in his multi-decade career. Terminator and T2: Judgment Day rocketed him to stardom, and reprising his role feels so much like the actor honoring the character that made him famous. And yet, 2015's Terminator: Genisys is so lousy that it's hard to believe that Arnie came back for any kind of artistic reasons. Moreover, his high-profile divorce from Maria Shriver following revelations that he'd fathered a child with the couple's housekeeper probably didn't come cheap. Alimony don't grow on trees, you know?

Ben Kingsley won an Academy Award for his stirring performance in the titular role in Gandhi in 1982. He also earned a Golden Raspberry nomination for his performance as the cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypudha in 2008's The Love Guru. We'll just let that sink in for a second.

The one and only Michael Corleone, Al Pacino, shows up in Adam Sandler's 2011 cinematic sad-fest Jack and Jill, playing a version of himself that's a little too close to the truth to be funny. One of the movie's most infamous scenes shows Pacino waltzing into a Dunkin' Donuts to rap about the new Dunkaccino drink. After seeing the commercial, the in-movie Pacino angrily tells Sandler's ad exec character to burn the film. See, the joke is that an actor of Pacino's caliber would be embarrassed about lowering himself to appear in such a piece of trash. And yet, Jack and Jill was still released in theaters.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is an artifact that holds an interesting place in pop-culture history. It came out in 2009, not long after waves of nostalgia brought a box office bonanza to Michael Bay and his cohorts for Transformers. G.I. Joe stars Channing Tatum well before he became a star; the role has since led many filmgoers to be surprised at how good of an actor he really is. Meanwhile, Tatum's friend Joseph Gordon-Levitt—whose star was rising thanks to roles in movies like Brick and (500) Days of Summer—portrays the movie's version of the Cobra Commander. That's right, that dude who just couldn't get one over on the Joes back in the '80s cartoon. That's the role Gordon-Levitt couldn't possibly pass up.

Two of Hollywood's most bankable actresses, Halle Berry and Sharon Stone, signed on to star in Catwoman, a not-quite-an-adaptation of the classic DC Comics anti-hero. One actress played a woman who routinely covered her face in materials largely consisting of stitched leather, and the other played Catwoman. The movie was a disaster, and, needless to say, the Catwoman franchise wound up being about as desirable as a pile of warm hairballs.

The adaptation of the Wardstone series of novels came and went during February of 2015, and earned a 12 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Jeff Bridges was joined by his Big Lebowski costar, Julianne Moore, playing John Gregory the Spook, and an evil witch named Mother Malkin, respectively. Whatever magic they had together on-screen in Lebowski seems not to have followed them to Seventh Son, sadly.

Peter Dinklage's star turn as Tyrion Lannister in HBO's Game of Thrones means that he can be as choosy as he wants when it comes to the roles he takes in movies. So, for some reason, he and his agent decided that he needed to be cast in Pixels, a movie where Adam Sandler plays some guy, who knows the president, who's played by Kevin James, and all of them fight space alien video game monsters, and it sucks.

Seth MacFarlane's 2012 movie Ted, where he played a foul-mouthed, sentient teddy bear with a heart of, well, something, managed to convince moviegoers that the guy could make a movie marginally worth seeing. That trust allowed him to make A Million Ways to Die in the West, an unfunny spoof on Westerns, where he cast himself as the lead opposite the extremely talented Charlize Theron. Theron must've lost a bet, or made some bad investments, or maybe she needed money for some emergency surgery, because there is no reason for her to have appeared in this film.

For a while there, it sure looked like Nicolas Cage was building himself quite a career. From big budget action films like The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off, to more introspective films like Adaptation and Matchstick Men, Cage seemed not only able to do it all, but willing as well. Unfortunately, he took that last part and forgot the first part, and pursued starring roles in some of the worst movies ever made. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, two Ghost Rider movies, Next, Knowing, Drive Angry, and the truly abominable Left Behind—all of these movies seemed to be necessary to pay off Cage's mounting debts. At the end of it all, one of Hollywood's most promising and talented stars has turned himself into a meme-factory and one of the best parts of YouTube. That leaves one question: Is it bad that we actually prefer him this way?