Hugh Jackman's Most-Debated Movie is a Long-Forgotten Flop

Well, if you try to measure quality by the level of response from fans, the answer is quite surprising. As Jackman told in an interview to Vanity Fair, the movie which produces the most fervent reaction is The Fountain. Never heard of it? Well…

"When people stop me, it's the most passionate response of any movie I've done. The ones who get it, have to tell me, and they have to tell me fully what it meant to them."

Jackman also said that The Fountain "was a real turning point" for him as an actor and expressed only the warmest feeling for the movie's director, Darren Aronofsky.

And that is quite unexpected.

The Fountain (2006) was an ambitious, complex genre-bending movie, consisting of three storylines involving quests for immortality and loss of loved ones… but as far as we can tell, it ended up too ambitious for its own good.

It flopped in the box office, earning less than half of its budget, got blasted by critics (the critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is "visually rich but suffers from its own unfocused ambitions"), and by now it is practically forgotten.

It is pretty much the least successful film in Aronofsky's entire career, and one of the least successful films with Jackman in the main role (only The Front Runner was an even worse flop, box office-wise, and that film at least got Jackman a Hollywood Actor Award).

But as it seems, while The Fountain certainly was not for everyone, those people who liked it really liked it. As Aronofsky noted in the interview above (they did it together with Jackman): "I think there's a deep love for that film that I haven't gotten from anything else and that it keeps coming."

So, if you want to check The Fountain for yourself, be wary of suddenly falling in love with that film, as well as of total disappointment!