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Your Highness sucked, says James Franco

Star slates the box office bomb, but he's certainly not the first to bad-mouth his own work

James Franco has admitted that his 2011 medieval comedy film 'Your Highness' really wasn't up to snuff.

Despite its star-studded cast – including Danny McBride, Natalie Portman, Damien Lewis, Charles Dance and Zooey Deschanel – the film was both critically mauled and a box office disaster.

[Related story: The weird world of James Franco]



It seems that Franco is now on board with the popular consensus.

“'Your Highness'? That movie sucks,” he told GQ magazine, in an excerpt from an interview in its forthcoming comedy issue. “You can't get around that.”

Indeed you can't.

He is, of course, not the only star to have slated their own work at some point during their careers. Most gamely, Sly Stallone is quick to name the low point in his extensive body of work:

“I made some truly awful movies. 'Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot' was the worst. If you ever want someone to confess to murder, just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes,” he said.

We'd argue 10 minutes would be enough.

The voice of Megatron, Aussie actor Hugo Weaving, angered director Michael Bay after he slagged off his own work in 'Transformers' last year.

“I didn’t care about it, I didn’t think about it,” he said in an interview. “I don’t regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it’s meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly.”

It must have been doubly upsetting for Bay when Megan Fox weighed in too ('too much SFX and not enough acting opportunities').

George Clooney's stint as Batman didn't sit well with him: “I’ve been in those 'Pluto Nash' kind of movies - Batman and Robin cost $160 million - and you know they’re a waste of money,” he said, after admitting that he thought the film could have 'killed the franchise'.

Speaking about how Amy Adams almost starred alongside him in M. Night Shyamalan's baffling 'The Happening', Mark Wahlberg said: “She dodged the bullet. It is what it is. F***ing trees, man. The plants. F*** it."

Most eloquently, perhaps, was Alec Guinness who was never particularly enamoured with his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in 'Star Wars'.

In letters to a friend, he wrote: “Can’t say I’m enjoying the film. New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper - and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable. I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread, which will help me to keep going until next April.”

In a later missive, he added to his misery on set.

“Apart from the money, I regret having embarked on the film,” he continued. “I like them all well enough, but it’s not an acting job, the dialogue ― which is lamentable ― keeps being changed and only slightly improved, and I find myself old and out of touch with the young.”

So James Franco... not the first and doubtless not the last.