10. Oppenheimer (2023)
The Sag-Aftra strikes haven’t just stopped actors from acting. They are also forbidden from promoting their work, and that means no more interviews, no more larky YouTube videos and, crucially, no more gala premieres. Nothing demonstrated this better than this month’s Oppenheimer premiere in London. The event was moved forward by an hour so that the cast could get dressed up, walk the red carpet, and then leave again as soon as they entered the cinema. This was a very public act of solidarity, or perhaps they just couldn’t stomach sitting through 400 different scenes of strangers telling J Robert Oppenheimer how brilliant yet flawed he is.
9. Haunted Mansion (2023)
Which isn’t to say that the studios won’t do their darndest to ignore the problem. Disney’s Haunted Mansion, by all accounts, doesn’t look like a particularly good film. But what it does have going for it is a large and starry ensemble cast, featuring the likes of LaKeith Stanfield, Jared Leto, Jamie Lee Curtis and Owen Wilson. Pre-strike, this would have at least made for a splashy premiere. Understandably, however, none of them turned up. Disney’s response? Sending some characters in their place. The main attractions for the Haunted Mansion premiere were Mickey and Minnie Mouse – or rather, some people plodding around doing Mickey and Minnie Mouse cosplay. The whole thing looked feeble and desperate, and it’s unlikely to be replicated soon.
8. Mission: Impossible III (2006)
But this is a list of weird premieres, not just miserable strike-affected premieres. So to gee things up, let’s look back to 2006. Mission: Impossible III came right in the middle of Tom Cruise’s wilderness years. The couch jumping. The testy interviews. The getting banned from the Paramount lot by mogul Sumner Redstone. But Cruise decided to dig his way out of trouble the only way he knows how: via ostentatiously elaborate transit. He attended the Tribeca festival premiere of M:I 3 having variously travelled there by motorcycle, speedboat, taxi, helicopter, sports car and – most daringly of all – the New York subway system. What a guy.
7. Men in Black 3 (2012)
These days, Will Smith is primarily known as the man who lost his temper and slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. But it wasn’t always like this. Before last year, don’t forget, he was primarily known as the man who lost his temper and slapped a reporter at the Men in Black 3 premiere in Moscow. As a prank, Ukrainian prankster Vitalii Sediuk attempted to kiss Smith on the red carpet, and was met by the back of his hand. “What the hell is your problem, buddy?” Smith scowled as he slunk away. Two years later, Sediuk was arrested for trying to punch Brad Pitt at the Maleficent premiere.
6. Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Few films are as aggressively anti-commercial as Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster’s impenetrable three-hour dream logic nightmare. As such, you’d expect its premiere to be full of glowering, stone-faced cinéastes, and few others. So when Mariah Carey turned up, pouting on the red carpet in her finest leather trousers, it came as a wildly incongruous sight. Her appearance did make some amount of sense – Aster used one of her songs to soundtrack a sex scene, which she apparently approved after watching the scene on her phone. But, still, her verdict on the film itself remains frustratingly unknown.
5. Break (2020)
Billed as “the first film premiere since lockdown”, the July 2020 launch of the British crime drama sounds like an absolute nightmare. The red carpet was covered in stickers reminding everyone to socially distance; the party organisers went into administration days before the premiere, leaving producers panic-buying alcohol in Tesco an hour before people turned up; and, for safety, it took place at a drive-in cinema in a car park at Brent Cross shopping centre in north-west London. To think, for a while we thought all future premieres would be like this.
4. Gone with the Wind (1939)
Gone with the Wind’s premiere took place at Loew’s Grand Theater on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. It was huge, the culmination of an event that saw thousands of fans lining the streets to see the film’s stars travel the seven miles from the airport to their hotel. At least, some of the stars. Hattie McDaniel, who would later win an Oscar for her role as Mammy, was banned from attending due to Georgia’s segregation laws, along with all the film’s other black actors. Producer David O Selznick lobbied the local government to let McDaniel attend, and Clark Gable threatened to boycott the event entirely, but all to no avail.
3. Dogma (1999)
Kevin Smith’s fourth film was a comic exploration of religion, possibly best known for giving us the lasting image of “Buddy Christ”. However, when the film premiered at the New York film festival in 1999, the event became the focus of a thousand-strong protest from groups such as the Catholic League and the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property – one of whose leaders called Smith a puppet “manipulated by the devil”. At a subsequent screening, Smith is said to have written his own placards and joined the protest outside the cinema.
2. Transcendence (2014)
Wally Pfister’s thriller was such a mess that it ended up being overshadowed at its own premiere. In 2009, a woman named Nancy Lekon stood trial for murder, after being accused of mowing down and dragging a pedestrian for almost a mile under the limousine she was driving at the time. She pleaded guilty by reason of insanity, claiming that she was driving so carelessly because she was in a hurry to see her boyfriend. That boyfriend, she claimed, was Johnny Depp. And, as such, her lawyer chose the Transcendence premiere as the perfect time to subpoena him.
1. Under the Cherry Moon (1986)
There is possibly only one person on Earth who remembers Prince’s second film fondly, and that’s a former Wyoming chambermaid by the name of Lisa Barber. As the 10,000th caller in an MTV Win a Date with Prince competition, Barber’s prize was to attend the premiere of Under the Cherry Moon, which would now take place in her home town, Sheridan, along with the chance to invite 200 friends. The event teetered on the edge of disaster throughout – there were drugs everywhere, Prince was capriciousness defined, and Barber really preferred the work of Mötley Crüe – but it eventually went off without a hitch. So much so, in fact, that Barber has never married because, in her words, “Prince never came back”.
