Matthew Shepherd revisit’s 2016’s Collateral Beauty…
Hollywood humiliations are both rare and fascinating occurrences. Unlike other examples, this isn’t a quiet burial of a cheap production nobody believed in, but the very public implosion of a film that had everything — a-list cast, optimal release slot, financially bolstered awards campaign and an intriguing trailer that made cinema audiences sit up straight. Collateral Beauty, David Frankel’s 2016 drama, is this series’ most extreme case of a film that had no business failing yet somehow did so catastrophically anyway. When you list the names attached to it, the collapse becomes almost incomprehensible. When you understand what the film actually is, it becomes entirely logical.
The premise, as sold, is straightforward and emotionally weighty. Howard, a high-powered New York advertising executive played by Will Smith, suffers the death of his young daughter and retreats entirely from his own life. Unable to process his grief, he begins writing letters to abstract concepts — Love, Time, and Death — as a way of making sense of what he has lost. It sounds like a prestige drama about grief, loss, and the strange logic of human coping. The kind of film the Academy claws for. The kind of film that fills December multiplexes with adults who have cried before and are yearning to do again.
However, what makes Collateral Beauty’s disappearance intriguing is that the film was positioned as a massive event film. Will Smith, at this point, had Concussion and Focus behind him and remained one of the most bankable names in Hollywood. Around him, the production had assembled a cast that reads like roundtable reunion of industry powerhouses. Edward Norton. Kate Winslet. Helen Mirren. Keira Knightley. Michael Pena. Naomie Harris (who the same year appeared in Moonlight) which won Best Picture. Every one of them around the peak of their careers, gathered around a concept that Warner Bros. believed had genuine awards potential. The New York shot film landed a December 16th release date, squarely in Oscar season and directly where dramatic films go to be taken seriously.
The production itself had a turbulent build before a single frame was shot. Hugh Jackman was originally cast in the lead role, with Rooney Mara attached alongside him. The film’s original director departed over creative differences. David Frankel came on board relatively late, Smith replaced Jackman, and the cast gradually assembled around a script by Allan Loeb that nobody, it seems, thought to question too carefully. The warning signs were there, they were just ignored.
The first trailer, released in September 2016, was extremely effective. Sentimental, emotionally calibrated, packed with recognisable faces for all audiences and the suggestion of a profoundly meaningful experience. Warner Bros. positioned the film as a modern A Christmas Carol — a broken man visited by the personifications of the very concepts he was raging against, slowly pulled back into life by facing his emotions head on. At the time audiences responded well. The marketing had worked and people wanted to see it.
The film that arrived bore only a surface resemblance to what had been advertised. Howard’s encounters with Love, Time, and Death are not the film’s spine. They are just a sideshow. The actual story is that Howard’s colleagues, played by Norton, Winslet and Pena, are concerned about the future of their company and hire actors to portray Love, Time, and Death, manipulating Howard’s grief for corporate reasons while planning to digitally erase the performers from footage to make him appear mentally unfit to run the business. The film that audiences thought they were seeing, about a man finding meaning through transcendence, is a film about his closest friends gaslighting him while managing a financial crisis. That gap between promise and delivery was not missed with audiences and critics noticing it immediately, and they were not forgiving about it.
The critical response was one of the most savage seen for a recent film of this calibre. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 14%. A production executive close to the film told Deadline the reviews constituted a “schoolyard assault.” Whatever the framing, the damage was done. The film opened to just $7.1 million, marking the worst wide-release opening of Smith’s entire career, finishing fourth at the domestic box office behind Rogue One, Moana, and La La Land. Admittedly tough competition but considering the stars attached and plot promised this should have been much higher if received well. It ultimately grossed $88 million worldwide against a $36 million budget, technically profitable however practically a disaster for a film with these expectations.
What lingers is the question of how it happened at all. The script’s main deception, which has Howard’s friends manipulating a grieving father for financial gain, is not a side conversation or subtle observation. It is the main plot. Everyone who read it before cameras rolled had to have understood that the film being made were not the same object. Whether that gap was a miscalculation in conception, a deliberate choice from marketing, or simply a failure of anyone to speak truthfully in a room full of famous people and studio money is unclear. It has been years and still nobody involved has offered a convincing explanation.
Collateral Beauty is not a forgotten film in the way 2019’s Serenity is forgotten. People remember it. They remember it as a punchline. What actually disappeared is any serious engagement with why it exists at all. Audiences and critics are still questioning why this cast, this concept, and this level of studio support produced something so spectacularly misaligned with itself. The answer to that question is more interesting than the film, which is perhaps the most damning thing you can say about any movie.
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Matthew Shepherd
