Role Ending Misdemeanor / Film

There is a two-week waiting period (after the termination of a role) before an example can be added. This ensures the job loss is accurately reported, actually sticks and avoids knee-jerk reactions.

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In General

• The film industry in the Western world was hit by the "Weinstein effect", which saw numerous actors and producers seeing themselves booted from prominent films as a result of sexual misconduct allegations:
  • Harvey Weinstein was a popular film producer and co-founder of Miramax and The Weinstein Company who had several Oscars to his credit. On October 5, 2017, however, his career came to an end when several investigative reports - first by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in The New York Times and then in a widely-read article by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, reports that won the trio a Pulitzer Prize - led to the discovery of sexual harassment allegations against him going back decades. Three days later, Weinstein was dismissed from TWC. At the same time, several A-list Hollywood actresses - including Rose McGowan, Annabella Sciorra, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashley Judd, and Angelina Jolie - accused Weinstein of sexual assault, rape, or misconduct. The ensuing firestorm evaporated Weinstein's considerable clout in Hollywood virtually overnight, and further cost him his membership in the Academy, along with his marriage. He was eventually arrested on May 25, 2018. And that was just the beginning: It also encouraged other women (and a few men) to publicly charge others in Hollywood of sexual abuse, which led to the accused being fired from their respective jobs as well. As of February 2023, he is serving a consecutive sentence of 39 years, where he'll be at least 105 years old when/if he's released from prison.
    • Revelations later in the year included a death threat to Salma Hayek and forcing her to add the lesbian sex scene in her movie Frida, a collusion conspiracy to keep actresses such as Judd and Mira Sorvino out of Hollywood (the latter which was revealed by Peter Jackson, who Sorvino thanked for revealing the truth),^note Both Judd and Sorvino were considered by Jackson for The Lord of the Rings films when Miramax had the rights, but Weinstein pushed Jackson not to cast either actress, claiming that the two were prima-donnas. Judd and Weinstein are still in a legal fight over this, and Jackson plans to testify on her behalf if/when it goes to trial. former collaborator Quentin Tarantino allowing Uma Thurman to reveal some extremely troubling details regarding the production of Kill Bill out of guilt over waiting until after the scandal broke to speak out about his experiences with Harvey, and Harvey's brother Bob facing similar accusations. Ultimately, Bob was also pushed out of the company by potential buyers, including the owner of their former company Miramax.
    • Weinstein president David Glasser was fired following a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General which named him as a complicit figure by inaction towards Weinstein's misdeeds, which presented a very real danger of scaring off the best buyer they could find up to that point just as the sale papers were about to be signed. It didn't help that said sale was mentioned by insiders to be TWC's last chance to avoid bankruptcy.
    • The Weinstein allegations also created a rare case of the person committing the "misdemeanor" pushing the "role-ending" on another person trying to uncover said misdemeanor. Rose McGowan has alleged that her film career dried up after Weinstein raped her, with her attempts to report the incident getting her blacklisted from all Weinstein productions. (She did go on to have more success in television, however, playing Paige Matthews on five seasons of Charmed.) Robert Rodriguez has stated that he went out of his way to cast her in Grindhouse (a Weinstein-produced film) mainly because she told him about her experience and he wanted to literally "make him pay" for it — and that Weinstein proceeded to bury the film as retribution. Later, McGowan was charged with cocaine possession, which she alleges was set up by Weinstein to make her look even less credible.
  • Actor and comedian Andy Dick, who has had a long history of creepy behavior (including his indirect involvement in the murder of fellow comedian Phil Hartman), lost two film roles back-to-back in October 2017, shortly after the Weinstein allegations broke. First, he was dropped from the cast of the indie film Raising Buchanan after several members of the cast and crew accused him of assault. The same week, he lost his role in the comedy film Vampire Dad on his first day of filming after he groped a PA while being prepared for his first scene.
  • Woody Allen had his 2018 film A Rainy Day in New York pulled from release by Amazon Studios that June after both the Weinstein scandal and earlier sexual assault accusations made by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. ^note Allen has denied all the allegations and was never formally charged with anything following a police investigation, with Dylan and Mia Farrow arguing that the investigation was botched. He lost a civil case about it and the judge ruled that his behavior towards her was disturbing. However, the civil case was more about Farrow allegedly coaching her daughter to say she'd been abused, not about the alleged abuse in and of itself. The film is about Jude Law's character dating a minor played by Elle Fanning so Amazon just saw it as too much of a lightning rod and it wouldn't see the light of day until MPI picked it up in 2020. Amazon cut all ties with him and terminated his contract. He sued them and the matter was settled out of court in late 2019.^note Ironically, A Rainy Day in New York did eventually become available on Amazon's Prime Video streaming service in 2021. He's unlikely to ever get work in the US or UK ever again as several high-profile American/British actors have apologized for ever working with him and/or said they wouldn't do it again^note Michael Caine, Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Timothée Chalamet, Elliot Page, Hayley Atwell, John Turturro and Natalie Portman, just to name a few. French actress Marion Cotillard says she knew some of the details like that he's married to his former stepdaughter when she was in one of his movies but didn't feel it was her place to judge someone else's marriage. She says she wasn't aware of the whole picture due to the fact that the that sort of American news just doesn't have traction in France. However she also says she wouldn't have worked with him had she known and won't associate with him any further. and some have even directly apologized to his daughter.^note Greta Gerwig wrote an op-ed in The New York Times to her, while Mira Sorvino, who had her own career tarnished by Weinstein, was able to reach out to her through her brother, Ronan. Even his past accomplishments have been affected, as Manhattan is no longer considered the first letterboxed home video release, a feat currently attributed to other films instead, such as Don't Give Up the Ship, Auditions, Hooper, and S.O.S. Titanic. He’s tried his luck at making movies with continental Europeans (where controversies broadly and #MeToo more specifically don’t stick as much) to middling effect. He also tried to shop around a long-gestating memoir in 2019 to no avail before finally being picked up by Hachette Book Group for March 2020 release. Hachette canceled its release and relinquished the copyright a few weeks before that when their staff walked out in protest. It was eventually released under an independent publisher that same month.
  • Roman Polański was relegated to directing Pirates when he committed statutory rape of at least one 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty, but then fled the country to avoid serving his sentence.^note In this case, we're talking Role-Ending Felony. This forced him to delay his project; initially, he was also supposed to play Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red's sidekick Frog, but by the time he finally got around to making the film, he had apparently already figured out he was too old for the part. In an odd case, Polanski wasn't the only one who lost his intended role because of his crime and subsequent cowardice; Jack Nicholson, who was supposed to play Captain Red, found himself caught up in the same scandal^note The incident happened at his house, though he wasn't involved when the role was given to Walter Matthau. Polanski has only worked in Europe since he fled the United States. He continued to have a career for a few more decades, winning international awards for films like The Pianist and The Ghost Writer, but that ended in 2017 due to the #MeToo movement, and whatever sympathy or acclaim he once had completely evaporated. Especially when it became wider knowledge that 13-year old Samantha Gailey was far from his first victim and Polanski was in fact a serial sex offender, with several of his victims having been even younger. By the next year, he was stripped of his AMPAS membership the week after Bill Cosby was convicted, and the distribution of his films subsequently became extremely limited and more controversial than ever.
  • Jon Peters was a producer who once ran Columbia Pictures and had a hand in several successful films for Warner Bros. such as Tim Burton's Batman films, Caddyshack and most famously, A Star Is Born (1976). Despite his tendency for eccentric behavior and Executive Meddling, he managed to turn a profit with the films he produced. His career took a sharp turn, however, with the critically panned Wild Wild West and leaks of his eccentric behavior and questionable approach to handling planned films for Superman and Sandman films spread on the Internet. The final straw came when five separate sexual harassment allegations hit him in the new millennium, which effectively killed his career and caused him to withdraw from the public eye. Since Ali in 2001, he has only had three credits for Superman Returns, Man of Steel and A Star Is Born (2018), the latter two doing so purely out of contractual reasons with no real involvement from Peters.
  • Kevin Tsujihara, the CEO of Warner Bros., was forced out of his role in March 2019 after his involvement in a Casting Couch scandal was uncovered. He had been promising the woman with whom he'd been having extramarital affair auditions and roles in exchange for sexual favors.
  • After numerous allegations of sexually harassing underage girls came out in June 2020 against comedian Chris D'Elia, he was booted from the Zack Snyder-directed, Netflix-distributed zombie film Army of the Dead, with Tig Notaro being cast that August to replace him in reshoots.
  • After the sexual allegations involving Kevin Spacey came out, Netflix canceled a Gore Vidal biopic that was in the works. To make matters worse, the Ridley Scott-directed thriller All the Money in the World had its Oscar campaign for Spacey dumped and its premiere at AFI fest canceled at the behest of producers and Scott himself. Later, Spacey himself was dropped from the film only five weeks before its release and entirely recast by Christopher Plummer — who was then nominated for an Oscar for his work on the film just two months after he filmed it. His only other completed film at the time, Billionaire Boys Club, was quietly dumped on VOD and he has yet to work in Hollywood since.
  • Louis C.K. was dropped from nearly everything he was currently working on - such as I Love You, Daddy, a stand-up special for Netflix, an animated comedy called The Cops, and the sequel to The Secret Life of Pets (where he was replaced by Patton Oswalt as the voice of lead character Max) - and his acclaimed comedy series Louie was canceled by FX, after he confirmed a series of sexual allegations thrown against him in November 2017. I Love You, Daddy itself—which is about a 17-year-old girl falling for a 68-year-old filmmaker—would later have its release canceled by its distributor thanks to its premise and the allegations. His cameo in Gravity Falls was also removed, with Alex Hirsch redubbing his dialogue personally for the digital streaming release.
  • Bryan Singer was fired from Bohemian Rhapsody after repeatedly disappearing from the set for hours at a time and then disappearing completely when the cast and crew took a break for Thanksgiving. When he was on set, his behavior was described as erratic and he often got into nearly-violent arguments with lead actors Rami Malek and Tom Hollander. His contract with the studio was already not renewed earlier in the year in the wake of child sex abuse allegations predating those leveled at Weinstein, but according to him, the camel's back broke when he, of all things, took care of a sick parent. Malek's complaints to the studio and the looming allegations (which broke very shortly after he was fired) led many to suspect the writing was already on the wall for Singer before the Thanksgiving disappearance. The same allegations would later convince him to resign as executive producer of FX's Legion (2017). Things got worse in 2019 when a day after Bohemian Rhapsody received 5 Oscar nominations, an explosive investigative article was released detailing the allegations of rape and child sex abuse at Singer, including new accusations. While producer Avi Lerner remained committed to keeping Singer on board for a Red Sonja film, this more or less made it unlikely he will ever get another directing job at a major studio and cost Bohemian Rhapsody its Best Picture Oscar chances. In early February, Millennium Films confirmed Red Sonja was being pulled from the schedule, more or less confirming Singer's career had been set ablaze. Worse, many suspected that Lerner kept him on the film specifically to screw it and the many people working on it over; his own suspect behavior in the aftermath of Weinstein's downfall certainly hasn't helped his case. It certainly didn't help him, either, that he waited until the next month to just come out and say Singer was fired.
  • In the months leading up to the release of Deadpool 2, T.J. Miller was at the center of several pieces of terrible publicity, including being part of the sexual abuse allegations arisen during the Weinstein effect, accusations of transphobia by a former friend, and eventually concluding in calling in a fake bomb threat at Penn Station in revenge on a woman he'd argued with until he got kicked off the train, which very fortunately didn't end in mass death and injuries. Ryan Reynolds made a statement that he booted Miller out of Deadpool & Wolverine and Miller's lines in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World were redubbed by Justin Rupple.
  • After misconduct allegations came out against him just before the release of Coco in November 2017, John Lasseter took a leave of absence from Disney and ultimately fell on his sword the following June, deciding to resign from the company by the end of the year. Lasseter would get a second chance with Skydance Animation following his resignation from Disney; however, it remains to be seen how that will pan out, especially considering his mere hiring cost Skydance Media as a whole a quite bit of respect. Nearly 35 years earlier, Lasseter's first stint at Disney ended with his being fired outright for promoting computer animation. Skydance's hiring of Lasseter prompted Emma Thompson to leave the production of the studio's animated film Luck, with her role being recast with Jane Fonda.
  • Max Landis was fired from the World War II horror project Shadow in the Cloud in April 2019 after it came to light that he allegedly was a serial rapist and sexual predator, with the film's star Chloë Grace Moretz and the producers confirming that the script was being extensively re-written by director Roseanne Liang. Soon after the allegations came to light that June, he was dropped by his agent Britton Rizzio and his upcoming film Deeper starring Idris Elba was canned altogether.
  • Zig-zagged with Shia LaBeouf. He'd spent most of his twenties and early thirties in and out of legal trouble due to his alcoholism and had an accompanying series of bizarre public behavior. He'd also developed a reputation as difficult to work with and had rumors of being abusive following him around for years, not at all helped by a viral video that came out of his 2017 arrest, showing him struggling with police officers and hurling expletives and threats at them after getting kicked out of a bar in Savannah, Georgia for his drunkenness. He'd been turned down from a few franchises because of this but had managed to build a solid, acclaimed resume in smaller and mid-budget movies. However, this all changed in the fall of 2020, just as he seemed to be poised to break into more mainstream films again. In September, he exited Olivia Wilde's sophomore directorial project, Don't Worry Darling, before production started, citing a scheduling issue. Then in December, he was sued by his ex, FKA twigs (real name Tahliah Barnett) for sexual battery and emotional distress. Twigs claims that he emotionally and physically abused her and intentionally gave her an STD. She also claims that she tried for about a year to try to get him to settle out of court to keep things private but only moved to litigation when he forced her hand. He put out a statement acknowledging that he's been abusive in the past. After the lawsuit was filed, Variety reported that Wilde had personally fired him from Don't Worry Darling when they didn't get along and he had other run-ins with the cast and crew since she has a strict "'no assholes' policy". Netflix cancelled their planned Oscar campaign for him for Pieces of a Woman and he checked into a long term treatment facility on Christmas Eve. Marvel Studios also briefly considered him for a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, then changed their minds when the scandal broke out. He later announced he was taking an indefinite hiatus from work. He did return to film in 2022, playing the famous Franciscan saint Padre Pio.
  • The Dallas-based independent film studio Cinestate collapsed in June 2020 after producer Adam Donaghey, a core member of the studio's production team, was arrested for the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. Soon after, allegations poured out claiming that Cinestate heads Dallas Sonnier and Amanda Presmyk had known that Donaghey was a sexual predator and covered up his behavior for years, that he had racked up a litany of sex offenses on the sets of their films, and that said films also had No OSHA Compliance and endured Troubled Productions, long hours, and frequent injuries to cast and crew as a result. In the aftermath, following a fumbled attempt at damage control that only seemed to inadvertently confirm the allegations, Cinestate sold off Fangoria magazine (which it had relaunched to much fanfare in 2018) and the film website Birth.Movies.Death. (which it had just recently purchased from the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain in May), and shut down its film website Rebeller and its corporate website. When Sonnier relaunched the studio the following year, he did so under a new name, Bonfire Legend, in order to distance it from the scandals that destroyed Cinestate.
  • Cinematographer Adam Kimmel, best known for working on The Ref, Capote, and Lars and the Real Girl, was expelled from the Academy and forced to leave the American Society of Cinematographers in March 2021 after an investigation by Variety the previous November revealed he was a convicted sex offender, after having pleaded guilty in 2004 to third-degree rape; a subsequent arrest in 2010 for sexual assault also cost him his job as cinematographer on Moneyball.
• Both Robert Mitchum and Lila Leeds were busted for marijuana possession in 1948, during a time when an arrest record would practically kill any celebrity's career. While the fiasco made the pages of Confidential magazine and boosted Mitchum's "bad boy" image, Leeds never worked in Hollywood again and went back home the year afterward, suffering a fatal heart attack in 1999.
• Joan Bennett and her third husband Walter Wanger had an altercation that contributed to the decline of both their careers:
  • Bennett, best known for starring in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Man Hunt, and The Woman in the Window, had a thriving film career in the '30s and '40s. That came to a sudden halt in 1951 after Wanger shot and injured her then-agent Jennings Lang (no relation) because he suspected they were having an affair. This didn't end their marriage on the spot — she and Wanger wouldn't separate until 1965 — but it did cause Bennett to receive a lot fewer movie offers over the years to come, as she would only put seven more film roles under her belt after the shooting. Decades later, Bennett blamed the judgmental social climate of the era for starving her career, saying "If it happened today, I'd be a sensation. I'd be wanted by all studios for all pictures." She managed a small comeback on television in the late 1960s with Dark Shadows, sustaining herself until then on the odd stage performance, and she returned to film in a supporting role in Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), largely due to her association with Fritz Lang's work. The role earned her a Saturn Award nod for Best Supporting Actress, but Bennett never acted behind a camera after that; she married one final time before dying of heart failure in 1990.
  • On the other hand, Wanger — once the prolific producer of such classics as John Ford's Stagecoach and Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent — was convicted in Lang's shooting, and served a four-month prison sentence. His career suffered following his release; with the exceptions of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I Want to Live!, none of his films were successful. The final straw came with the infamously Troubled Production of Cleopatra, which evaporated whatever goodwill he had left, and Wanger never produced another film prior to his fatal heart attack in 1968.
• Antonio Sabato Jr. was never an A-lister, but he had a steady career in the 90s and 2000s as a model, Mr. Fanservice and Soap Opera actor. He made the poorly thought out decision to speak at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, where he claimed Barack Obama was a Muslim, and was one of the few actors to publicly support Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Although Trump won the election, the actor was dropped by all his representation, fired from a reality show and one of his films was even refused distribution simply because he was in it.
• On February 1, 1922, William Desmond Taylor, a popular figure in the growing Hollywood film industry, was shot in the back inside his home in Los Angeles. His murder, which is unsolved as of 2023, produced a number of suspects that the press, already in frenzy over the Fatty Arbuckle case, would bring to ruin in the years to come:
  • Margaret Gibson, who had already been in trouble with the law before Taylor’s death for vagrancy and allegations of opium dealing, was arrested for felony extortion late in 1923. Though the charges were dropped, the damage was done; she would only work in bit parts and supporting roles until the industry’s transition to sound film spelled the end of her career. Although Gibson didn’t even warrant a mention in the investigation of Taylor’s murder, and no evidence pointing to her exists, she reportedly confessed to the deed shortly after suffering the heart attack that would claim her life in 1964.
  • Mary Miles Minter, a child star and protégée to Taylor, was deeply infatuated with the man and wrote a number of love letters to him — none of which were answered on account of Taylor being thirty years older than her. Some of those letters, however, were found in Taylor’s apartment and wound up in the press — and the media circus that followed left Minter’s career in tatters. The actress, who by then had acted in over fifty films, many of them lost, only acted in a grand total of four after that — all of which have since been lost as well. She would receive offers for more, but Minter declined them all, living the rest of her life in relative peace and quiet until her fatal stroke in 1984.
  • Mabel Normand, who had frequently collaborated with Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin, was the last person known to have seen Taylor alive. It was this that caused her to be labeled another suspect in his murder — and although she was eventually ruled out, by that point her career was already in decline: Normand’s work with Arbuckle meant that the ban on his film roles stifled her exposure as well. Several relapses from a cocaine addiction she was nursing at the time—along with an incident where her chauffeur had used her gun to shoot and wound a wealthy oil broker — further damaged her reputation and eventually led to her retirement from film. She died of tuberculosis in 1930.

Creators

• Japanese actor Hirofumi Arai was arrested and indicted in February 2019 for his sexual assault of an outcall masseuse the year before. His talent agency, Anore Inc., terminated his contract as a result. Arai was eventually sentenced to five years in prison that December.
• Fatty Arbuckle may well be the Ur-Example of this trope in film. A major star in the medium's early days, he was widely held in high regard, and often compared to the likes of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. However, his career was abruptly halted on September 5, 1921, when a young, aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe was found with a ruptured bladder in one of the rooms he and his friends had rented for the night; she stayed conscious just long enough to say that Arbuckle was responsible. Four days later she was dead, and while Arbuckle protested that he had merely been attempting to help her when her health was falling apart (Rappe had chronic cystitis and was in poor health due to multiple back-alley abortions), fellow actress Bambina Maude Delmont accused Arbuckle of raping Rappe and inadvertently killing her in the process. The media jumped on Delmont's story, leading to a firestorm of coverage that painted Arbuckle as a sexual deviant and put him through three highly sensationalized trials. While Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, he was forced to pay $700,000 in legal fees, costing him both his home and all of his cars, and was blacklisted from Hollywood for a year. He would add only a few more roles under his belt after that while directing other films under a pseudonym, and Arbuckle languished in obscurity until his fatal heart attack in 1933 — reportedly on the very day he was given the opportunity for a Career Resurrection.
• Kim Basinger suffered a huge hit to her career for several years after she officially agreed to star in Boxing Helena, only to be horrified when she actually read the script and refused to do the film. Such a contract breach is a huge deal in Hollywood, and hardly anyone would touch her until she finally was able to get a Career Resurrection with her Oscar-winning role in L.A. Confidential. It's actually now generally agreed that she made the right decision, as Helena ended up such a disaster that her career would have taken an even bigger hit if she'd appeared in it, which is what ultimately happened to Sherilyn Fenn, who took the part after Basinger dropped out.
• Warner Bros. terminated its contract with Busby Berkeley, known for musicals such as Flying High, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, and Gold Diggers of 1935 after he was arrested for drunk driving. It didn't help that The Hays Code was just starting to be stringently enforced, and Warner suddenly had to become a lot more cautious to ensure its films didn't promote immorality.
• Herman Bing, a well-known character actor from Germany (who also voiced the Ringmaster from Dumbo), lost appeal to American audiences when he was rumored to have sympathized with the Nazis during World War II, though these rumors were never actually proven. This left him unable to find any work in Hollywood so that, two years after World War II ended, Bing fell into depression and shot himself to death.
• Lillo Brancato Jr., best known for playing teenaged Calogero in A Bronx Tale and Matthew Bevilaqua in The Sopranos, was jailed for burglary which caused the death of a policeman in 2009. He's been trying to get his career back on track since getting out on Parole in 2013, he hasn't been able to star in anything from a major studio since.
• Actor Rory Calhoun's past as a juvenile delinquent making the pages of Confidential magazine was an inversion of this, as instead of ruining his career, it only boosted a "bad boy" image for him, despite Calhoun's persona not being that of a "bad boy" beforehand, although the fact that Calhoun's religious conversion had played a part in his rehabilitation smoothed the way.^note Not only did the news not affect in any way Calhoun's role in the film he was shooting at the time the news was released, The Spoilers, but he also got a surge of offers to appear in Westerns. Interestingly, years later it was discovered that Calhoun's "outing" as former juvie had been the work of his agent Henry Willson, who had given Confidential Calhoun's story in a deal he made to protect his biggest star – Rock Hudson – from being outed as gay.
• Carmine Caridi, a character actor best known for his roles in the last two Godfather films and the Fame TV show, became the first-ever person to be expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) when he was caught sharing his Oscar screener DVDs with a known pirate in 2004. In addition to being removed from the Academy, he was ordered to pay $300,000 to the studios. Following the incident, Caridi only acted in two more films, both of which were obscure indie titles, before dying in 2019.
• In 2021, Noel Clarke was awarded a special BAFTA for his contributions to the British film industry. Barely a month later, at least twenty women accused him of bullying and sexual harassment. As a result, he was suspended from BAFTA and Sky cut ties with him.
• Eddie Deezen was dropped by his public relations manager Steve Joiner in June 2021 after a waitress came forward accusing Deezen of stalking her at work and writing abusive Facebook posts (including one where he called her a "whore").
• Johnny Depp got the boot from two separate franchises over the course of several years due to his worsening personal behavior and legal issues:
  • Disney decided to not renew his Pirates of the Caribbean contract during the production of Dead Men Tell No Tales in Australia for his behavior while filming that lead to several on-set issues and a PR nightmare for Disney:
    • The first of which was that he'd recently fallen off the wagon and spent the production drinking and doing hard drugs and was often late to set because of it. Disney had to hire a production assistant just to watch his rental house after he left the whole set waiting around for hours and hours at one point. One weekend, he took about eight ecstasy pills and went on a rampage where he did approximately $100,000 worth of damage to the house (which Disney was paying for) and severed his fingertip. He had to be flown home to the US after this to see a specialist which cost production to shut down for a precious and expensive two weeks.
    • All of this paled in comparison to his legal issues with the Australian government that embarrassed Disney. He and then wife Amber Heard had lied on biosecurity paperwork to try to bring their dogs with them without being subjected to the mandatory quarantine period. The whole drawn-out saga took a year and had everyone from fans to Disney wondering if he was going to be charged with dog smuggling. He and Heard ended up taking a deal where she pleaded guilty to perjury because the dogs were technically hers but they both had to publicly admit to breaking the law and pay a huge fine. The affair was a huge draw on Disney's already thinning patience with him because they believed he'd lied to them and their insurers about being sober when his contract was renewed and were upset with him about the damage to the rental house and in large part led to them deciding to part ways with him for good and reboot the series from scratch.
  • He was dropped from his role as Gellert Grindelwald in the middle of production of the then-upcoming Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore when he lost a libel lawsuit in the UK in November 2020 that found Heard's domestic violence allegations were true to the civil standard. The judge found that 12 of 14 instances of DV met this bar and therefore it wasn't libelous to call him a "wife beater". One instance was inconclusive and one wasn’t ruled on since he hadn’t been able to sit for a full deposition. He was quickly re-cast with Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen.
• Special effects artist John Dykstra was fired from Industrial Light & Magic for leading the special effects team of Battlestar Galactica (1978), which was perceived as a ripoff of ILM founder George Lucas' A New Hope, though several of his employees remained at ILM, their original home turf. Dykstra would later prove that he was no Pete Best through Apogee's involvement in numerous big-budget productions throughout the '80s.
• Marianne Faithfull screen-tested for Lady Macbeth in Roman Polański's version of Macbeth, but was rejected immediately once her heroin addiction was discovered.
• Megan Fox was not included in Transformers: Dark of the Moon because of her statements comparing working under Michael Bay to working for Hitler (Bay said in June 2009 that Fox was fired on orders of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who disapproved of her comments). Fox and Bay have apparently reconciled and she was cast as April O'Neil in the Bay-produced remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and she returned for the sequel.
• Lynne Frederick's career flourished in The '70s as she became known for Girl Next Door roles in horror films, but it started to falter with her marriage to Peter Sellers in 1977, as his failing health meant that she had to turn down roles in order to serve as his caretaker. She might have been able to make a comeback after Sellers died in 1980, but a nasty legal battle over his will that saw her named as the sole beneficiary, followed by a short-lived marriage to journalist David Frost, made her the target of a vicious smear campaign by the British media portraying her as a Gold Digger. As a result, by 1982 she was blacklisted from the British film industry. Her career never recovered, and she died in obscurity in 1994 in what many suspect was a suicide.
• Former Netflix CCO Jonathan Friedland was fired from the company in June 2018 after having uttered the N-word twice within a short timespan, first during a company meeting where they discussed offensive language, then in another meeting with human resources that same day. Presumably as a form of damage control, Netflix launched an advertising campain emphasizing their black talent just a few days later.
• The career of film composer Dominic Frontiere (best known for films such as The Stunt Man and Hang 'Em High and TV series like The Outer Limits (1963)) was destroyed when he was jailed for a year in 1986 for scalping $500,000 worth of Super Bowl tickets (obtained from his then-wife, Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere) and not reporting it to the IRS. After his jail sentence ended, Georgia filed for divorce and Frontiere scored just one more film, Color of Night, before his death in December 2017.
• Edward Furlong, the child star of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was not approached to reprise his role as John Connor in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines because of his history of chronic substance abuse, alcoholism, and domestic violence. Furlong reported that he is broke because his acting career is dead and that he wasn't able to support himself merely from the small roles he had after T2 which was only exacerbated by the child and spousal payments he was required to make. In 2019, Furlong surprised fans by telling them he's back for Terminator: Dark Fate. When the actual film was released, it turned out his contribution to the film was minuscule at best, because only his likeness returned.
• Richard Gere has stated that his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government, especially for its treatment of the people of Tibet, caused his star power to fizzle out, specifically pointing to two incidents in The '90s that earned China's ire. The first was when he presented the Academy Award for Best Art Direction in 1993 and took the opportunity to condemn what he called the "horrendous, horrendous human rights situation" in Tibet, which got him banned from all future Oscar broadcasts after producer Gil Cates called his and other political speeches at the Oscars that year^note Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon also went off-script to speak on behalf of Haitian refugees, and were banned for the same reason "distasteful and dishonest". After that, his 1997 thriller Red Corner, about an American businessman working in China who is targeted by corrupt government officials, was not only Banned in China due to its deeply critical portrayal of the nation's justice system, but caused the nation's Media Watchdog to threaten a ban on future cooperation with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer over their role in producing the film. As partnerships between Hollywood studios and Chinese production companies deepened in the 2000s, Gere's career dried up as Chinese companies refused to work on any film that hired him, and his last starring roles in mainstream studio films before he moved to the indie circuit were in 2008's Nights in Rodanthe and 2009's Brooklyn's Finest.
• Mel Gibson became persona non grata in Hollywood in the mid-late '00s following leaked audio of a DUI incident in 2006, in which he went on a drunken, anti-Semitic rant to his arresting officer while graphically hitting on her. While people had first started accusing him of anti-Semitism after the release of his film The Passion of the Christ two years prior (which was a box-office smash, but criticized by Jewish groups for its portrayal of the ancient Hebrews), this seemed to confirm those accusations in a way that the film couldn't. Some more leaked rants in 2010, this time towards his girlfriend (who filed for a restraining order) and including multiple racial slurs, only buried him further. In 2016, Gibson directed Hacksaw Ridge, which was a critical and commercial success, and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, but chances of a Career Resurrection seem dim as most of his work since has been in independent/B-movies.
• A temporary case with James Gunn. He was initially dismissed from directing the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 by Disney chairman Alan Horn — unilaterally, it turned out, and without consulting anyone else — shortly before production after the resurfacing of tweets he had made a decade prior that joked about rape and pedophilia. Gunn had apologized for these tweets in the past, but they were dug up in July 2018 by alt-right political commentator Mike Cernovich, who began a campaign to get Gunn fired from the movie for them. It was later revealed that Cernovich dug up dirt against Gunn to protest Disney's firing of virulent Donald Trump supporter Roseanne Barr for her racist tweets (Gunn has made it clear on social media that he is not a fan of Trump or his policies). Although pretty much no one defended the content of Gunn's tweets, many people called out Disney for firing Gunn for years-old comments while buckling to the extremely controversial Cernovich, with many pointing out that his apology for the tweets predated his hiring by Disney and they should have known about them already. A petition made to reinstate Gunn to the film would eventually garner 345,000 signatures, and the entire cast of the film released a signed statement in support of him (with one of them, Dave Bautista, actually threatening to quit the film and join Gunn in whatever new project he would make). Despite the pushback, and the fact that Disney didn't have anyone but Gunn in mind to direct GOTG3, since Disney was at the time trying to acquire Twentieth Century Fox and didn't want to show any sign of weakness, the company had no choice but to place Gunn under suspension, and officially deny from time to time that they had any plans of bringing him back, until March 2019. In the interim, Gunn decided to help out next door at the DC Extended Universe by directing The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, after which production on Vol. 3 resumed and the film was released in May 2023. Gunn would later be hired to co-run the newly-reorganized DC Studios in late 2022.
• In an example of one person's legal troubles costing another person his job, Marlon Brando had a warrant for his arrest in Italy due to his involvement in the erotic film Last Tango in Paris, which had been banned there as legally obscene, and that precluded any shooting for Superman: The Movie in Italy. The director originally assigned to direct Superman, Guy Hamilton, ended up paying the price, as that meant he was relegated to filming in the UK, but he could only work there for a limited time due to tax-related circumstances. When production failed to get sufficiently off the ground on time, his job went to Richard Donner.
• Armie Hammer announced in January 2021 that he would be stepping down from his role in Shotgun Wedding (2023) after screenshots of Instagram messages purportedly from Hammer's secret account circulated on social media. The messages generated controversy, as they not only showed him messaging with various women while he was still married, but also contained what were described as "disturbing sexual fantasies" that included cannibalism. By February, he was forced to leave the Paramount+ series The Offer and had been dropped by both his publicist and his talent agency. He was later accused of raping a woman in 2017, for which the LAPD opened an investigation. Disney retained him for its adaptation of Death on the Nile only because the film had already been completed for more than a year and had been sitting on The Shelf of Movie Languishment during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and their acquisition of 20th Century Fox came with the stipulation that all films completed prior to the merger had to receive a first-run theatrical release. He was, however, removed from Next Goal Wins in December 2021, with Will Arnett cast to replace him.
• Anne Heche said that publicly coming out as bisexual and in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres killed the star push she was getting in the late '90s, a time when it was far less acceptable for Hollywood actors to be open about their same-sex relationships. While appearing on the red carpet for Volcano with DeGeneres didn't stop her from landing the lead female roles in Six Days, Seven Nights and Psycho (1998), she did not work in a studio picture for ten years after that. Her breakup with DeGeneres three years later on bad terms also got her blacklisted from her ex-lover's popular talk show, which further contributed to her lack of roles as studios wouldn't be able to promote their films on DeGeneres' show if Heche starred in them.
• The success of Airport was this to Universal-affiliated producer Ross Hunter, who was personally fired by Lew Wasserman, who appears to have not been a fan of the film if his desire to kill it once it went overbudget is anything to go by, after proclaiming that the film's success ensured several years of steady salaries for Universal employees.
• German actor Emil Jannings was one of Hollywood's most prolific actors in the 1920s, becoming the first person to ever win an Academy Award for Best Actor. ^note As of 2021, Jannings is the only German to receive the award. His career in Hollywood ended with the advent of talkies, with audiences being unable to understand him due to his thick accent. During World War II, Jannings starred in and produced several Nazi propaganda films, such as Ohm Krüger and Die Entlassung; following the war, his association with the Nazi regime brought a permanent end to his acting career, and he retired to Austria where he died in 1950.
• Jeffrey Jones committed career suicide with his child pornography incident in 2002. He has only done one film since, although he did have a role in Deadwood and was allowed to keep doing voice work for Invader Zim.
• The handling of the promotion of Aladdin and the Black Friday cut of Toy Story both became this for Jeffrey Katzenberg's career at Disney. After fellow exec Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter crash before the release of The Lion King, Michael Eisner passed him over for Wells's spot as president, which led to Katzenberg resigning as chairman in August 1994 and eventually establishing DreamWorks SKG as a serious rival to Disney's dominance in the animation sector two months later. Many saw the slight as an example of Eisner's growing ego, but Eisner did have a point: Katzenberg's reckless actions in promoting Aladdin had permanently strained Disney's relationship with Robin Williams, and though Williams would return to work with Disney a few more times following Katzenberg's resignation (including Aladdin and the King of Thieves), the whole fiasco resulted in serious repercussions for decades to come^note Namely, a stipulation in Williams's will declaring that no one was to use any more new materials from Williams for 25 years following his death. As for the Black Friday cut of Toy Story, it was exactly what Katzenberg had asked for,^note Both Katzenberg's and Eisner's visions demanded a more cynical outlook, which was depicted with the toys meaner than in the final draft, with Woody in particular deliberately throwing Buzz out the window rather than getting jealous, but only accidentally knocking him out of it in the final version and it nearly got the film totaled.
• John Landis' film career was abruptly halted after a helicopter crash on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie killed Vic Morrow and two (illegally employed) child actors, which uncovered a litany of violations from ignoring the advice of his safety officials and the pilot of the helicopter itself to illegal child labor. Although never convicted of manslaughter charges, he did plead guilty to the labor violations, and the incident essentially snuffed out any future of directing feature films. The incident also caused major bad blood between him and Steven Spielberg, who removed Landis from his Director's Cut of 1941 (1979). The footage was eventually restored for the Blu-ray release, though Landis' film career never fully recovered, leaving him mostly relegated to television production work to this day.
• Tenor and actor Mario Lanza was dismissed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after recording the songs for The Student Prince in 1952, due to Creative Differences with its director Curtis Bernhardt.
• During the late 1980s, Rob Lowe was celebrated as the new male sex symbol in films and television. This ended after he was caught in a sex tape scandal (before sex tapes became popular shortcuts to fame).^note Adding to the controversy was that the other person in the sex tape was a 16-year-old girl, although no legal issues came from that as the age of consent in Georgia (where the tape was made) was 14 at the time. His performance of "Proud Mary" alongside Eileen Bowman as Snow White at the start of the 1989 Academy Awards ceremony shortly afterwards certainly didn't help matters. In The '90s, Lowe made a comeback on the small screen with The West Wing and Parks and Recreation, but his career has never been as popular as it was before the scandal.
• In March 2023, Jonathan Majors was a star in the making coming off of critically acclaimed performances in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Creed III, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. That changed overnight after he was arrested in New York City after getting into a violent dispute with his girlfriend Grace Jabbari that ended with her being hospitalized. This set off a domino effect that saw several other women accuse Majors of assault, him being let go from his agencies and several upcoming projects (such as an Otis Redding biopic and an adaptation of the Walter Mosley novel The Man in My Basement), and his upcoming film Magazine Dreams being shelved indefinitely (with Disney eventually selling the distribution rights back to the filmmakers). For a while, Marvel Studios held off on letting him go from his role as Kang the Conqueror in the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to the character’s importance to the franchise, but once he was convicted of assault and harassment that December, they fired him in a matter of hours. Majors was also dropped from the lead role in upcoming Dennis Rodman biopic 48 Hours in Vegas following his conviction.
• Jayne Mansfield was the target of numerous tabloid sex scandals in The '50s, which at the time was enough that no studio would touch her. She retreated to the more open-minded independent American film industry and European film industry and got by on several quick and cheap films for a few years, in the meantime becoming the first major American actress in a post-silent Hollywood film to have a nude scene in Promises! Promises! (1963). Mansfield did show some signs of being able to regain her former career, but was sadly killed in a car accident in 1967 before she could fully capitalize on it.
• Director John McTiernan of Die Hard and Predator fame saw his career collapse after he pleaded guilty to perjury and lying to the FBI over having a private detective illegally record phone conversations in the 2000s, one of which was fellow producer Chuck Roven. McTiernan had disagreed with Roven about the direction of Rollerball, and he hoped that if he uncovered evidence of Roven badmouthing the studio, he could blackmail him into going along with his vision by threatening to release it and have him fired. When this finally came out, McTiernan lied to the FBI twice by claiming that the private detective was related to his divorce and that there was no discussion of wiretapping. When caught in these lies, the plea deal he made was originally vacated and he faced much longer jail time. Ultimately, McTiernan would get a 12-month sentence, with the majority of it in a prison cell, and the last few months under house arrest. His decision to file for bankruptcy in an attempt to prevent the repossession of his ranch—combined with Rollerball proving a dud with both critics and audiences—all but ruined any chance of a possible comeback. Roven, by very stark contrast, would have a very successful career producing The Dark Knight Trilogy and much of the DC Extended Universe, including Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman.
• Randall Miller will probably never direct another film (and is, in point of fact, legally prohibited from doing so until 2025) after camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed on the set of his planned film, Midnight Rider, in 2014. He had illegally filmed a dream sequence on an active railroad track rather than arrange with a railroad company to film on an inactive track. The film company scrapped his footage while Miller served a year in prison for manslaughter.
• Marilyn Monroe was fired from what would be her last film, Something's Got To Give. She had been suffering from several ailments - including bronchitis, fever and chronic sinusitis - and this caused delays. While George Cukor opted not to delay production for a month, as suggested by the studio doctor, and just shoot scenes the actress didn't need to be there for to allow her time to recover, the following month saw her only occasionally showing up because of said ailments. The production fell ten days behind schedule and went overbudget, and the script was being rewritten nightly, which exacerbated Marilyn's anxiety over having to memorise new lines. While they celebrated her 36th birthday on set after a full day of working, she soon experienced a flare up of sinusitis and called in sick for the next day. 20th Century Fox, fearing a disaster similar to the recent Cleopatra, fired her four days later. The film itself ended up cancelled after star Dean Martin refused to continue with another actress, and she was rehired with production tentatively set to resume in October of that year. Unfortunately, she would pass away in August, leaving the film incomplete.
• Tony Moran, who played the unmasked Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), bragged to the fans that he had a Remake Cameo in Halloween Kills. However, after insulting John Carpenter and his deceased girlfriend Debra Hill, accusing Jamie Lee Curtis of sleeping around, and making homophobic slurs against fellow Michael Myers actors Tyler Mane and James Jude Courtney, his part was cut and he does not appear except in archive footage from the original film.
• David Niven, a Quintessential British Gentleman in The '30s, was carrying on an affair with Merle Oberon. During this time, he accompanied Oberon on a rail trip from New York City to Los Angeles, spending the entire trip having sex in Oberon's private carriage. The US had a law at the time called the Mann Act, which forbade the transport of women for "immoral purposes" across state lines. Although the law was intended to simplify the prosecution of pimps and pedophiles, in practice it was used against "undesirables" such as interracial couples, foreigners, or movie stars — and Oberon and Niven fit into all three categories. Niven found himself having to go to ground for a while to avoid prosecution, and lost at least six roles. Note that this was a consensual relationship between two unmarried adults and that Oberon's career was also tarnished, although she was never targeted by the police (and, as Niven had asked, refused to speak to them).
• Nate Parker appeared to have a promising directing career ahead of him, with his 2016 film The Birth of a Nation being widely seen as having a decent chance for an Oscar, along with remaking the original infamous racist film into a powerful story of African-American resilience. This went down the drain after the media discovered Parker and his friend and screenwriter Jean Celestin were charged with rape back in 1999, during which Parker was alleged to have sexually assaulted his girlfriend at a time when she was drunk and later invited Celestin to join in. Parker was later acquitted at trial of rape, and Celestin, though initially guilty, would later find his conviction overturned on appeal, and he was never retried. Parker's decision to add a rape scene (involving real-life rape victim Gabrielle Union, no less) in the film only made the scandal worse. Although the film got decent reviews, the rape scandal ruined any chance of an Oscar nomination, and Parker wouldn't make another film in any capacity for three years; even then, though the end result won an award at the Venice Film Festival, it has yet to find a distributor.
• Amy Pascal was forced to resign as Chairperson of Sony Pictures after a number of e-mails from Pascal libeling various celebrities, as well as United States President Barack Obama (some of them going as far as making racist jokes), were leaked to the public as part of a cyber attack against the studio. Pascal has stated she will continue working with Sony, albeit in a minor role.
• A remake of Valley Girl featuring Logan Paul was pulled from its original 2018 release by MGM following the YouTube star's controversial video in Aokigahara, where he recorded and mocked the body of a suicide victim, and it sat on The Shelf of Movie Languishment for two years.
• In the early 1950s, starlet Barbara Payton was a highly successful actress. She was making $10,000 a week; had a 7-year contract with Warner Bros., was co-starring with the likes of James Cagney, Gregory Peck, and Gary Cooper; and was engaged to Franchot Tone. However, Payton was also a raging alcoholic, a sex addict who began a very open and torrid affair with B-movie actor Tom Neal while still engaged to Tone, mingled with known drug dealers and other shady characters, and couldn't stay out of trouble. Things came to a head on September 14, 1951, when Tone and Neal came to blows over Barbara's affections, with the latter (a former college boxer) pounding the former into an 18-hour coma. Her name became poison almost overnight in the wake of the fight: the press blamed Payton for the whole thing and had a field day raking her over the coals. She was fired from the starring role in the film Lady in the Iron Mask and lost her WB contract, and Tone would divorce her when it emerged she'd still continued her relationship with Neal even after their brawl. Payton made a few cheaper film roles before her career sputtered to an end in 1955, and her life followed suit in short order; she lost custody of her son (from her second husband, John Payton), found herself in trouble with the law for passing bad checks and prostitution—and her alcoholism would eventually claim her life in 1967, at the age of 39.
• Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter's 22-year dominion at Marvel came to an end in September 2015 when he tried to boot Robert Downey Jr. from Captain America: Civil War despite Downey being a vital asset to the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this stage, resulting in Marvel Studios' head Kevin Feige going over his head, and Disney siding with him. In the aftermath, Perlmutter would ultimately lose his position as Marvel CCO to Feige as well, remanded to the position of chairman in the company. The incidents largely seen as the last straw were not only a donation to Donald Trump's re-election campaign, but the first picture of the notoriously-secretive Perlmutter in years being one in which he appears with Trump, especially as Trump's presidency was becoming increasingly more controversial. Disney then took several prior questionable decisions he had made over the past decade into consideration, such as replacing Patty Jenkins with Alan Taylor as director of Thor: The Dark World over Creative Differences,^note Jenkins would ultimately direct Wonder Woman for the DC Extended Universe, which would become a success for the up-to-that-point divisive DCEU, thus causing major embarrassment at Disney over the blown chance, while Thor: The Dark World would go on to be considered one of the weaker films in the MCU blackmailing Feige into allowing The Inhumans to be adapted as part of the MCU and trying to have them replace the X-Men franchise-wide because of Fox having the rights,^note the end result would go on to be considered the worst reviewed entry in the MCU overall, beating out the other lesser-regarded installments The Dark World, Thor: Love and Thunder, Eternals, and Iron Fist by a long shot and his attempts to quash the film adaptations of Black Panther and Captain Marvel, which both grossed over a billion dollars for Disney, with his excuse being that comic-book fans wouldn't go see a superhero movie with non-white male leads.^note Which in the case of Black Panther, was ironic for Perlmutter to say given the success of the Blade movies for New Line Cinema.Perlmutter would eventually be ousted from Marvel altogether in 2023 after supposedly attempting to secretly get Kevin Feige fired via an ally in Disney's shareholders.^note Said ally was, oddly enough, Nelson Peltz, who also had a hand in the Executive Meddling that derailed The Last Airbender over a decade earlier.
• James Remar auditioned for, and was hired for, Aliens, but was fired days into shooting after he was caught with cocaine on-set^note He does appear in the final cut in a single shot — from behind, as the Colonial Marines glimpse the extent of the xenomorph hive in the atmosphere processor, a shot that was only kept because it was deemed too expensive to reshoot. He was subsequently replaced with Michael Biehn, and ended up running afoul of producer Walter Hill for more than a decade as a result. The details of his firing were kept tight-lipped by the crew, and Remar would later comment (many years after the fact) that he "messed (things) up with a terrible drug habit."
• Producer Scott Rudin was long infamous in the industry for his temper and a High Turnover Rate of assistants.^note with one article calling him "Hollywood's biggest 'a-hole'" In spite of this abusive reputation, as well as his implication in the same e-mails leaked in the Sony Pictures cyber-attack that led to Amy Pascal's exit, Rudin still became of the most successful and awarded film producers in the industry, picking up the Academy Award for Best Picture for No Country for Old Men, receiving two more Best Picture nominations in two consecutive years each, and a fruitful collaboration with director Wes Anderson. That changed in April 2021, when The Hollywood Reporter published an explosive article detailing the full extent of his bullying, up to and including smashing a computer monitor on an assistant's hand^note  requiring said assistant to seek medical attention, forcing producer Kevin Walsh out of his car and leaving him behind on a highway, forcing staffers to sign non-disparagement agreements, and removing his ex-employees' credits after they quit. In the ensuing fallout, Rudin's producing credits on several films with A24 were removed, with the company later cutting ties completely with him, while he would later "step back" from his upcoming productions on Broadway, including a revival of The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster^note Foster reportedly vowed to leave the production if Rudin continued to be involved, and resigned from the Broadway League.
• Winona Ryder took a four-year hiatus from acting due to a 2001 shoplifting charge, which she claims was done under the influence of painkillers prescribed by a quack doctor. Woody Allen stated in a memoir that he wanted to cast her in Melinda and Melinda along with Robert Downey Jr., but her arrest, along with his alcohol and drug problems, made trying to get insurance on them (and a subsequent bond to shoot the film) impossible. From 2006 onward, she returned to acting and made a range of film and television appearances, mostly in supporting roles. The fact that most actresses typically see their careers fizzle once they hit their late 30s didn't help. Luckily, her stock did rise with her high-profile supporting role in Stranger Things.
• Aviron Pictures founder William Sadleir was outed from the studio in 2020 when key financers BlackRock sued them both for fraud, structural impropriety, and conflict of interest. Sadlier was soon prosecuted for defrauding BlackRock by using identity theft to trick them into investing and later using their funds for his lavish lifestyle. He also transferred the COVID-19 emergency funds he applied for into his bank account when they were supposed to be used to keep Aviron's staff on payroll. The scandal brought the company down and they were forced to seek bankruptcy by the end of the year.
• In 2002, Brendan Sexton III, who played Private Richard "Alphabet" Kowalewski in Black Hawk Down, gave a speech to a socialist group saying that he thought that the final cut of the film was pro-war propaganda. While he said that the original script had more Grey-and-Gray Morality, he thought that the version that made it to theaters demonized the Somalis and portrayed them as idiots who bit the hand that fed them while whitewashing the US' role in propping up the corrupt Siad Barre regime in Somalia before its collapse. Sexton later said that this speech, given in the midst of post-9/11 Patriotic Fervor, got him blacklisted, cutting short a Hollywood Hype Machine push that started with Welcome to the Dollhouse.
• Following him slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards in 2022, Will Smith saw all of his roles put on hold until further notice, as well as a 10 year ban from attending any Academy events. This included the Netflix film Fast and Loose, as well as a fourth Bad Boys film and a proposed sequel to I Am Legend.
• In March 2021, Richard Stanley was hit with abuse allegations from Scarlett Amaris, his co-scriptwriter on Color Out of Space (2020), regarding their romantic relationship in the early 2010s. As a result, the American film production companies SpectreVision and Severin Films cancelled their relationship with him. In October 2021, Stanley filed a lawsuit for libel against Amaris in regards to the accusations, and in June 2022, the director's press team announced that Stanley (who resides in France) had been acquitted by the Tribunal Judiciary of Carcassonne.
• There are two conflicting accounts as to why 1930s film star Lee Tracy got canned from Viva Villa!. Charles Clarke, the film's cinematographer, claimed that Tracy was standing on a balcony in Mexico when someone in a military parade flipped him off. When Tracy responded in kind, the Mexican press pounced. Desi Arnaz, however, stated in his autobiography that Tracy had urinated off the balcony onto said parade instead—and that, from then on, it became the common practice for any crowd to suddenly disperse if an American was seen overhead. In either case, Tracy was fired, and his career was wrecked; he found little work as an actor until after World War II, and even then it was mostly on television until his Oscar nod for The Best Man (1964).
• Hot off the success of the film Chronicle, Josh Trank was immediately attached to several high-profile projects, with the first of them being 2015's Fantastic Four. Unfortunately, reports of his diva behavior on the set of the film started to leak out (for instance, acting abusive towards cast and crew, and showing up on set under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol), causing him to be fired from a Star Wars project, and reshoots for Fantastic Four were done behind his back. Once the film turned out to be a critically-panned box office bomb, his career as a promising new director was effectively ended, not helped by rude and condescending tweets insulting superhero movies and their fandoms. It took him five years to release a new film, Capone.
• Former U.S. President Donald Trump resigned from SAG-AFTRA^note (He was registered in it due to his many appearances As Himself in films before his presidency due to being a well-known businessman.) in February 2021 after its board voted to debate on whether to expel him from the union in light of the storming of the U.S. Capitol the previous January, which he has been accused of inciting as it was done by his supporters.
• Lana Turner's film career ended after her then-boyfriend Johnny Stompanato was killed and it was revealed that he had Mafia ties. Even though it was eventually revealed that Turner's daughter had killed him in self-defense in 1958, the damage was already done, and there was no possible way her career could ever fully recover for the rest of her life. She semi-retired from acting by the 1980s before dying of throat cancer in 1995.
• Raquel Welch was fired from the film adaptation of Cannery Row after five days of filming and replaced by (the much younger) Debra Winger. Welch subsequently sued Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for wrongful firing, claiming that she was only used by the studio to get financing and her firing was inevitable. The courts sided with Welch, but the subsequent lawsuit blackballed her from the industry. She continued to get work, but only in supporting roles; one of the few big things Welch did since then was a guest spot as herself on an episode of Seinfeld.
• Paramount fired Mae West in 1937 after she got NBC in hot water with the FCC by appearing alongside Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Already a fading star due to the Production Code and the rise of Shirley Temple, she only appeared in a few more movies after that, the most successful of them being My Little Chickadee.
• Steve Wilder, a bit actor, and friend of Shane Black, had his scenes of him playing a minor character in The Predator removed when star Olivia Munn discovered he was a convicted sex offender.
• B-Movie producer Tanya York saw her career come crashing down in 2011, after several filmmakers (along with her brother) came forward with lawsuits against her for several years of contract breaching, which involved withheld release date info and the embezzlement of their royalties. Tanya filed for bankruptcy soon after she left the film industry, and has since resurfaced with a new cosmetics company called MicroArt Makeup.
• Walter Zerlett-Olfenius was a German screenwriter attached to the Nazi propaganda piece Titanic (1943). During production, director and close friend Herbert Selpin criticized the German soldiers who'd been brought on as marine consultants for the film, as they were more interested in molesting the female cast. Zerlett-Olfenius reported Selpin to the Gestapo—and by the next day, Selpin had been arrested and found hanged in his jail cell. Though the death was officially ruled a suicide, everyone knew it had actually been an assassination carried out on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and would have revolted if Goebbels, the force behind the film, hadn't declared that anyone who shunned Zerlett-Olfenius would answer to him personally (and presumably meet the same fate as Selpin). Zerlett-Olfenius was eventually tried in 1947 for complicity in Selpin's murder, for which he was sentenced to four years in a labor camp and relieved of half his personal assets, and he would never work in the German film industry again before his death in 1975.

Films

• Production on Aziz Ansari's intended directorial debut Being Mortal was suspended in 2022 after a complaint was filed against actor Bill Murray accusing him of inappropriate behavior on-set. This led to an avalanche of previous misconduct allegations involving Murray coming back to light. The accusers included, among others, Geena Davis, Rob Schneider, Seth Green, Lucy Liu, and numerous cast members from Saturday Night Live. Filming hasn't resumed on Being Mortal as of 2024, with Ansari moving on to make Good Fortune instead.
• A Franchise-Ending Misdemeanor is Wesley Snipes' three-year prison sentence for tax evasion, which directly resulted in the termination of New Line Cinema's Blade franchise. Marvel reacquired the film rights to Blade when New Line/Warner Bros. were deemed unable to produce a fourth film on time due to Snipes' absence. In 2019, a new Blade film was announced for the Marvel Cinematic Universe... without Snipes, his role as the titular character going to Mahershala Ali, who previously played Cottonmouth in Luke Cage as part of the MCU's Netflix television series.
• Carry On... Series:
  • Liz Fraser had an ill-advised conversation with distributor boss Stuart Levy about how the films could be better distributed during the making of Carry On Cabby. This caused her to be dropped from Carry On Jack and Carry On Spying, and she wouldn't return to the series for another twelve years until Carry On Behind.
  • Charles Hawtrey had been a headache for much of the franchise due to his drinking habits and prima donna behaviour, but the final straw that led to him being dropped from the series was when he refused to do the 1972 Carry On Christmas special unless he got top billing over Hattie Jacques.
  • Gerald Thomas wanted Robin Askwith to do more Carry On films after Carry On Girls but felt that by starring in the Confessions of a... Series (the Carry On's main competitor in The '70s) he had betrayed the series.
  • Penny Irving was never asked back for another Carry On after her incident with Gerald Thomas on the set of Carry On Dick over the skimpy costumes she had to wear. Her agent had asked if she could do another, but Thomas' reply was "Don't mention her name to me again".
• Easy Rider has one of the most controversial examples of this. Originally, Rip Torn was cast to play George Hanson in the movie. However, during a dinner with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda at a New York restaurant discussing the movie, Torn and Hopper allegedly got into a fight after Hopper complained about the Southern culture and its adherents during his trips down there. Torn, a Texan, was pissed over Hopper's comments, and he withdrew from the project and was replaced with Jack Nicholson. In an interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Hopper claimed that Torn was fired from the film because he pulled a knife on him during the confrontation at the restaurant. Torn later successfully sued Hopper for defamation, claiming that Hopper pulled the knife on him. Fonda, for his part, claimed that whoever started it, they both went after each other—and that they were brandishing butter knives, not switchblades. The circumstances of this event have been long-debated and likely never may be fully answered, as Hopper died of prostate cancer in 2010, while Torn and Fonda both died in the summer of 2019.
• Jurassic World Dominion brought back the character Lewis Dodgson from the original Jurassic Park film as a major antagonist. However, this time he's played by Campbell Scott, as original actor Cameron Thor was imprisoned for lewd conduct with an underage girl in 2016.
• When it was decided to give Snow White & the Huntsman a sequel, the original film's director Rupert Sanders was not chosen to return, presumably due to his affair with Kristen Stewart. Although Stewart was slated to appear in the sequel, Universal dropped her, too, outside of archival footage, from the film, now called The Huntsman: Winter's War. Stewart claims she opted not to stay with the franchise due to disliking the scripts she was offered. The results were disastrous.
• Three actors from J. K. Rowling's Wizarding World franchise fell victim to this trope over the course of a decade:
  • Jamie Waylett was dropped from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after being charged with cannabis possession in 2009. Instead, Blaise Zabini appears as Draco Malfoy's second sidekick rather than Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle is killed in Crabbe's place, with Crabbe himself not appearing or being mentioned at all. Waylett was later sentenced to two years in prison for participating in the 2011 England riots.
  • As mentioned in his own section, Johnny Depp was fired from his role as Gellert Grindelwald when he lost a lawsuit that found it was legally permissible to call him a "wife beater".
  • Kevin Guthrie, who played Grindelwald's follower Abernathy, was also fired from The Secrets of Dumbledore, although he was fired at an indeterminate time before production started. He was charged and later convicted for a sexual assault that occurred in 2017. As a result, he did not come back for this film. Unlike Grindelwald who was recast, Abernathy does not appear nor is mentioned at all.
• The animated film Wonder Park had two firings from the film, both of which involved multiple allegations of inappropriate and unwanted conduct:
  • Director Dylan Brown was fired in January 2018, but because work on the film was nearly complete at the time, distributors Paramount and Nickelodeon couldn't credit a replacement. When Wonder Park was released in early 2019, Brown was uncredited.
  • Jeffrey Tambor was also fired as the voice of Boomer the Bear and was recast with Ken Hudson Campbell. This also led to his role as King Peppy in Trolls being recast to director Walt Dohrn in the sequel.
• Zulu Dawn fired actor John Hurt because he was flagged as suspicious by immigration checks in South Africa, where the film was to be shot. It was later discovered that they'd actually confused him with an American anti-apartheid activist with a similar name, but by that point he'd lost the role. As it happens, that also made him available as a replacement actor for Alien when one of its stars, Jon Finch, dropped out due to pneumonia.

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