The Exact Moment Josh Brolin Realized That Jonah Hex Was Going To Flop

It feels at times that people resent celebrities as much as they love them. They'll line up to see their latest movie at the multiplex, pay as much as they can afford to see them in a Broadway show, buy jerseys with their names stenciled on the back (or apparel endorsed by them), but if they express so much as a scintilla of discontent in an interview, a large contingent of fans will drag them for not being able to assuage their pain by looking at their bank account.

With this in mind, these kinds of people will likely sneer when I say that I can't imagine how painful it must be for an artist to do a full press tour for a movie they know is a piece of garbage. Traveling all over the world to feign excitement for a film that is about to get shredded by critics and, perhaps, on the verge of bombing at the box office sounds like a nightmare. Every day they have to sit down with reporters, plaster on an insincere smile and answer questions from people who likely know as well as they do that the movie they're promoting is an utter embarrassment.

I've been that reporter before, and, aside from some off-the-record comments where someone couldn't resist acknowledging at least some appendage of the big snorting elephant in the room, I've rarely gotten so much as a tacit eyeroll admitting that, "Look, you know and I know this movie stinks on ice." They play the game because their careers depend on it, but I can't imagine how miserable, say, Steve Martin felt making the press rounds on "The Pink Panther 2" (which did not make /Film's ranking of the 15 best Steve Martin movies).

If you're wondering whether the actors can sense whether the reporter sitting in front of them wasn't a fan of their latest work, Josh Brolin is here to tell you that they very much can.

While promoting Zach Cregger's superb horror smash "Weapons," Brolin dropped by Josh Horowitz's "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, and recalled the pain of doing press for his DC Entertainment disaster "Jonah Hex." Though Brolin was superb casting for the role of the facially scarred bounty hunter who traverses the Old West with the ability to speak to the dead, and was respected enough as a star to get the likes of John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Megan Fox, Michael Shannon, and Will Arnett on board, the film went crashing off the rails thanks in part to an inexperienced director in Jimmy Hayward (who, Brolin has admitted, he initially supported for the gig). After a while, they were scrambling to complete the film, which resulted in a director's cut the studio abhorred (though, in his interview with Horowitz, Brolin says the studio only made the movie considerably worse once they took it away from Hayward).

Nevertheless, Warner Bros. spent $47 million on the movie with an eye toward creating a franchise, so when it came time to sell the film to the public, Brolin did his turd-polishing duty. In doing so, he could "immediately" detect that reporters did not enjoy the scant 81-minutes they spent watching "Jonah Hex." As he told Horowitz, "[Y]ou know when everybody goes up an octave, there's a problem. They're like, [affecting a near falsetto] 'Oh my god, this is super good! I saw it!" I'm like 'I know you saw it!'"

Yeah, I've totally done that.

As for Brolin, he says his tell is a lack of enthusiasm. "I try to be real and authentic, and I don't necessarily sell it based on my extremely positive reaction," he told Horowitz. "I'll say things, 'It has an audience,' and stuff like that.'"

Every film has an audience. Somewhere out there is a person whose favorite film is "The Cat from Outer Space" (it might be the Broken Lizard crew). And god bless them for loving what they love sans embarrassment.