WTF Happened To....?‪!‬ JoBlo.com

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Julia Roberts was one of the dominant Hollywood stars for a good twenty-year period. From her breakout role in 1988’s Mystic Pizza, Roberts skyrocketed to the top of the A-list when she starred opposite Richard Gere in Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman. An unlikely Cinderella story about an escort that falls in love with a high-powered executive, it’s a movie that is definitely a Hollywood fairytale, but one that a lot of people loved in 1990, with it being one of the year’s top-grossing movies. From there, Roberts made a string of hits, including Flatliners, The Pelican Brief, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill and many more, but respect in more heavy vehicles eluded her. Movies like Mary Reilly and Michael Collins were embarrassing for how miscast she was, and for awhile, it looked like she would be stuck doing lightweight but highly profitable rom coms.

However, that changed in 2000 when she played the lead in Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich. Based on a true story, the movie finally won her the Academy Award that had long eluded her. It earned her serious cred, and her fame took on a whole new dimension, with roles in Oceans’ Eleven, Mona Lisa Smile and Eat Pray Love all big successes. Yet, as the business began to change, emphasizing tentpole movies, Roberts seemed to struggle more than contemporaries like Sandra Bullock to find her place. Eventually, she made a move into TV Prime Video’s Homecoming. Still, it’s notable how low-key the release of a show like Gaslit was despite the names involved. There was a time when Julia Roberts doing a TV series would have been an event. 

While Marvel fans got an incredible send-off for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine in James Mangold's Logan, another Wolverine movie was planned a few years earlier that would've taken the character in an edgier direction. Indeed, Darren Aronofsky was all set to reunite with his The Fountain star Hugh Jackman for the second spin-off sequel for the character, The Wolverine. In the end, Aronofsky left the project, with James Mangold taking over. While the finished film wasn't particularly well-loved by fans, it did pave the way for Logan, with Mangold arguably taking the franchise into an even darker direction than Mangold would have. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Unmade Movie, we look at Aronofsky's unmade Wolverine movie and try to figure out precisely what it might have been like. This episode is written by Bryan Wolford, edited by E.J. Tangonan, produced by Taylor James Johnson and narrated by Bronwyn Kelly-Seigh. 

Released 16 years after the original, this sequel feels like too little too late, or too much too late? It's hard to tell here because it's kind of both. Through a lot of twists and turns, most of them either nonsensical or uninteresting, we get to meet a gang of werewolves hosting parties for victims, a stepfather who searched for a cure, a tenuous connection to the first one, and ultimately, the last third that is just so 1990s, it almost hurts. So, what happened here? Let's find out WTF Happened To This Horror Movie?

Robert Zemeckis was one of the most prominent directors of the eighties and nineties. His string of hits is almost unmatched. Think about it - Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, What Lies Beneath, etc. This is why it’s so bizarre that a live-action Disney Pinocchio movie directed by Zemeckis and starring his best favorite leading man, Tom Hanks, was essentially dumped to streaming. It came and went without much fanfare, while it would have been a cinematic event fifteen years ago. WTF Happened?

In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, we dig into Zemeckis’ career, which began with the underrated pair I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars before Romancing the Stone made him an A-lister. We dig into how he was actually fired from Cocoon because the Fox brass thought Romancing the Stone would flop, leading to him making Back to the Future with pal Steven Spielberg. We dig into the then-impossible idea of mixing live-action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, show some love to Forrest Gump, and examine some underrated gems like Death Becomes Her.

But WTF Happened to Robert Zemeckis? In the 2000s, Zemeckis became a proponent of Motion Capture technology, leading to The Polar Express and Beowulf, movies which are a little uncanny valley if you revisit them today. Even if he’s not quite the mega-watt hitmaker he once was, with films like Welcome to Marwen being disastrous, he’s still capable of making gems like the fantastic Denzel Washington movie Flight. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, which is written (with Mathew Plale), narrated and edited by Taylor James Johnson, we dig into the director’s life, legacy and future. 

If you weren’t alive in the nineties, it’s hard to do justice to just how popular Beavis & Butt-Head were. Their MTV show was cutting-edge stuff, notably, because the two Mike Judges creations often mocked the very same artists the network had only years earlier played to great success (just ask Kip Winger). In the show, Beavis and Butt-Head’s adventures were intermingled with them providing commentary on music videos, something which would eventually be phased out as the brand grew in popularity beyond MTV. It was all part of MTV’s strategy to branch out beyond music videos, with its launch coinciding with The Real World and the start of MTV Films. The latter, of course, wanted to turn the teenaged animated phenomenon into a movie. After years of prodding, Mike Judge finally agreed to make Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. 

A Christmas of 1996 release, the film was a sizeable hit, grossing $63.1 million domestically. Still, oddly enough, it took decades for there to be a sequel, and even then, it was a streaming premiere tied to a new series rather than a full-feature. Perhaps it was due to Mike Judge being busy with King of the Hill and his features Office Space and Idiocracy. Whatever the case, in this nostalgic episode of WTF Happened to this Movie (written by Brad Hamerly, edited by Cesar Gomez & narrated by Mathew Plale), we look back at how the film came together and how the power couple of the moment, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, ended up being part of the voice cast. 

Today, we focus on one master of horror in particular and one of his final movies in his incredible filmography. Try to count how many cross-dissolve shots are in this thing as we dig into John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars and find out What Happened To This Horror Movie?