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Is Taylor Kitsch cursed?

Battleship follows John Carter by flopping in the USA, but is it Kitsch's fault?

Poor Taylor Kitsch. For the second time in a year it looks like the actor has headlined an epic flop, after ‘Battleship’ earned a mere £15 million on its opening weekend in the US.

That’s even less than Kitsch’s last effort ‘John Carter’, the big budget sci-fi epic that managed a similarly lacklustre £18 million. (Some context: ‘Avengers Assemble’ took more than £126 million in its first three days.)

[Related story: Kitsch sticks up for John Carter]
[Related blog: Five reasons John Carter was a huge flop]



A Disney bigwig said ‘John Carter’ would end up costing the company around £125 million, with ‘Battleship’ on target for a similar loss according to financial expert Michael Morris of Davenport & Co.

The film, co-starring Liam Neeson and Rihanna, had a vast budget (around £130 million) plus the same again for the huge marketing campaign that has seen Kitsch’s face plastered over buses and billboards around the world.

Despite the huge advertising push, it seems the public just couldn’t get excited about a film based on a Hasbro board game. Funny that.

In one of many negative reviews The LA Times’ Kenneth Turan said: “Powerhouse toymaker Hasbro ordered up a movie based on one of its most popular games and everyone... tried as hard as they could to fulfil the order. But that's hardly a recipe for excitement.”

The sad thing is, Kitsch is actually a very talented actor, which is how he landed the roles in these huge projects in the first place.  He’s been in the cross hairs of Hollywood casting agents for a while thanks to his complex performances as hard-drinking and womanising running back Tim Riggins in US TV show ‘Friday Night Lights’.

In both ‘John Carter’ and ‘Battleship’ Kitsch had stand-out moments. There was the fight scene intercut with him burying his family in ‘John Carter’, and the amusing burrito stealing sequence at the beginning of ‘Battleship’. But such moments were few and far between in scripts that used him mostly as a cipher for the action.

Kitsch will get a third and, one suspects, final bite at the big time with the upcoming ‘Savages’, an Oliver Stone gangster movie released this September. We hope it’s third time lucky for the unlucky would-be-movie star.