By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Back when he was a scene-stealer in the original Shout film, it seemed like Matthew Lillard was destined to be Hollywood’s next big star. Back to modern times, though, and he’s best known for his voice acting and convention appearances. Many of his fans wonder what happened to his career, and the actor has a surprising theory: he blames the downfall of Hollywood on the box office failure of Scooby-Doo 2: The monsters are unleashed.
In a recent interview with Business Insider, Matthew Lillard said, “I thought I would be No. 1 on the call list for the next 10 years of movies” after the release of the second movie featuring the Scooby gang. “And the reality is that the exact opposite happened,” he said. This virtually killed his dream of becoming a star and he eventually had to re-examine his priorities as an actor due to the film’s failure.
The failure of Scooby-Doo 2
By today’s standards, the box office failure that doomed Matthew Lillard’s No. 1 hopes seems rather benign: Against a budget of $25 million to $80 million, this Scooby sequel grossed $181.2 million. of dollars. Compared to the recent failure of Warner Bros. films. as The lightning And Joker 2this kind of mediocre performance seems very soft. However, the first film grossed WB $275.7 million against a budget of $84 million, so this sequel was a major disappointment for the franchise, grossing almost $100 million less than its predecessor.
Even worse is the fact that Scooby-Doo 2 was absolutely vilified by critics. Rotten Tomatoes has a critic score of 22 percent, with the critical consensus boiling down to the fact that, unlike the first film, only very young and immature children will enjoy this second outing. The film was terrible enough to deserve this kind of award: a Razzie for worst remake or sequel.
Matthew Lillard’s amazing attitude
As for Matthew Lillard, he looks back on all this with a rather zen perspective, noting that he was previously “caught up by the success of what I was doing…caught up by the games that I was receiving…caught up by this desire to be, in quotes , famous. When the Scooby sequel failed and ended his career ambitions, he stopped aggressively pursuing that level of fame.
Putting things into perspective, Matthew Lillard recalls an opportunity to appear on Dancing with the starsand he realized that appearing on something so stupid would effectively kill his chances of winning an Oscar. To that end, he explained to his agent what his updated priorities were now and why he was turning down his chance to become a reality TV star. “I’ll be famous and not a great actor, and I just wanted to be a great actor.”
Shaggy for a new generation
In many ways, this perseverance paid off: rather than disowning Scooby-Doo, Matthew Lillard became Shaggy’s voice actor in a number of animated feature films. Like Mark Hamill before him, the Shout The veteran has embraced a killer career in voice acting, winning over a new legion of fans. And the move to dubbing hasn’t stopped him from getting great live-action roles in serious films (like the Oscar-winning The descendants) and silly movies (like Five Nights at Freddy’s).
Honestly, we’ve been big fans of Matthew Lillard since the first Shoutand we can confirm that he’s somehow even more charming in person than on the big screen. It’s hard not to sympathize with the death of his star dreams, but it’s nice that he’s made peace with embracing a different path as an actor. Given how great he is in almost everything (especially David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), we can only hope to see even more of Lillard’s delightfully offbeat performances in the very near future.
Source: Business Insider