About 10 years ago, Gerard Butler and his washboard abs blasted onto the big screen in the box-office hit 300, making him a star. To this day, if you Google Gerard Butler, the first thing that comes up is his 300 workout. Unfortunately for Butler, not much else pops up, as he has failed over the past decade to capitalize on that 300 momentum. A new video from Looper outlines just where Butler went wrong.
The video first points to a factor that affects most of the other ones mentioned: Butler’s age. He was already 27 by the time he decided he wanted to be an actor, leaving his law career behind. So he missed the many years of technical and educational training many actors go through. Subsequently, certain acting tools are a major stumbling block for him: accents, for example. Looper points out that Gods Of Egypt likely would have been a box-office bomb anyway, but featuring Butler’s Scottish accent in a supposed Egyptian setting didn’t help matters much. He also notably swung and missed in an attempt on an Irish accent in P.S. I Love You, one of an unfortunate string of poorly received rom-coms he’s racked up, along with flaming piles of cinematic garbage The Ugly Truth with Katherine Heigl, and The Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston.
All may not be lost for Butler, however. Although his two Fallen films, Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, also received loads of critical derision (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s writeup of the latter is a stone-cold, F-rated classic), these movies actually made enough money so that a third one is in the works: Angel Has Fallen. Perhaps Butler has learned his lesson and is sticking to action movies rather than rom-coms. He’s also securely nestled into the How To Train Your Dragon animated franchise, where—fortunately for him—he can use his native Scottish accent.