Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie should have realized their marriage was sunk the minute they agreed to appear together in the 2015 small-budget “By the Sea.”
Couples who do movies together rarely stay together, recent Hollywood history shows.
Plus, films co-starring real-life couples have fared poorly at the box office.
Pitt and Jolie, or Brangelina, if you will, confirmed Tuesday they are divorcing — less than 11 months after their stinkeroo movie from Universal Pictures hit theaters.
A dark Scandinavian-style movie, “By the Sea” took in just $3.3 million globally.
Before Brangelina tempted the fates by appearing in the same film, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez — 2003’s It couple — starred in the August 2003 Sony Pictures release “Gigli,” a $54 million-budgeted movie that brought in $7.3 million at the box office worldwide, according to BoxOfficeMojo.
Five months later, the couple, aka Bennifer, were toast.
In 2002, Guy Ritchie directed his wife, Madonna, in “Swept Away.” The film spent 17 days in theaters, grossed less than $600,000 — and was roundly panned as a terrible remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film.
The marriage, it turned out, was a lot more successful. Married in 2000, the couple were divorced in 2008.
“A lot of these movies are either too sweet or too sour,” says Robert Marich, author of “Marketing to Movie Goers.”
“If audiences want tragedy, they can look into their own lives. They’re not going to pay $12 to see what they can experience in their own living rooms,” he said.
Marich says movie studios often fund films to keep stars happy, but “they don’t resonate with audiences. They’re cooked up in Malibu and they’re not vetted well.”
“There’s pressure on couples who try to work together in any business, whether it’s Wall Street or Silicon Valley,” says Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller professor of film studies at Wesleyan University. “Working together, I don’t think it’s a recipe for a happy marriage.”
The late superstars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who made 10 movies together — eight of them while they were wed — were married and divorced twice.
ComScore’s senior media analyst, Paul Dergarabedian, tells The Post that these flops are simply a function of quality. “It rises or falls on the quality of the movie, not the external forces or the idea of a couple being in a movie.”
