Matt Damon And Heath Ledger's Fantasy Box Office Flop Was Also A Disaster Behind The Scenes

"I'm used to riding roughshod over studio executives. But the Weinsteins rode roughshod over me."

Those are the words of director Terry Gilliam, speaking with Time in 2005 about his movie "The Brothers Grimm." It was a co-production between MGM and Dimension Films, Miramax's genre label. The division was run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who were, at the time, at the top of the food chain. Obviously, this was years before Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison for various crimes that included sexual assault.

Needless to say, Gilliam didn't enjoy working with them, and the unhappy marriage between filmmaker and studio resulted in a major box office flop. It's a shame too, as the fantasy adventure flick had a lot going for it. Namely, stars Matt Damon, who's currently headlining Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," and Heath Ledger, who later played the Joker in Nolan's "The Dark Knight." Interestingly, Ledger met with Nolan for the lead role in "Batman Begins" around this time, but it didn't pan out.

Instead, he signed on to co-lead this movie alongside Damon, working with the director of "Time Bandits" and "Brazil." The film follows a pair of con artists, Jake and Will Grimm (Ledger and Damon), who travel from village to village pretending to protect people by performing fake exorcisms. However, they wind up encountering a real magical curse on one such mission. Fantastical hijinks ensue.

"Usually, my battles are when I finish a film, but this one got off to some very bad beginnings," Gilliam explained in an August 2005 interview with the New York Times. That's not a great way to start a film that was supposed to carry a $75 million budget, the most expensive Dimension had ever made up to that point (per Variety).

Terry Gilliam and the Weinsteins didn't see eye-to-eye, to put it mildly. That makes the failure of "The Brothers Grimm" at the box office not terribly surprising, with the benefit of hindsight.

"The division was so extreme, we're talking about two different films," Gilliam said in that same NYT piece. "The powers that be kept talking about 'another film,' and I said, 'I don't think there is another film.'"

Gilliam went to war over the ending of "Brazil." He's no stranger to putting up fights. But this was especially bad, so much so that he left during post-production to make another movie. "I walked off and did 'Tideland' and came back six months later," he told the NYT.

Bob Weinstein pushed back on some of this, claiming, "We had a great relationship with Terry. It was standard operating procedure. He made a great movie, and now we're going to market it in a way that's true to what it is — a great story."

In a 2009 interview with Sense of Cinema, Gilliam explained that he took the job, despite not caring for the film's script, on the advice of producer Charles Roven. Things got rough enough that Gilliam tried to leave when the Weinsteins fired his cinematographer Nicola Pecorini six weeks into shooting. "I thought, 'This is my chance to get out of the film,' but I was then told by my lawyer that it wasn't as easy as that, so I had to continue," he recalled.

In addition, the Weinsteins overruled Gilliam's desire to cast Samantha Morton (who's also in "The Odyssey") as the female lead and hired future "Game of Thrones" star Lena Headey instead. What's more, they nixed the plan to have Matt Damon wear a prosthetic nose.

All told, the final budget for "The Brothers Grimm" was north of $80 million. It would not, in the end, be able to justify its hefty price tag, either, as it was a critical and commercial failure (if one that, in retrospect, was easy to see coming).

The movie opened in theaters on the weekend of August 26, 2005, as one of the last big summer films to arrive that year. It didn't go as planned, though, and was largely rejected by critics. Indeed, it only has a 38% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ranks pretty low on the list of Terry Gilliam's movies, generally speaking. Beyond that, it couldn't overcome its competition, which was stiff but not wildly so. On its opening weekend, it placed second with $15 million domestically behind "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" ($16.2 million), which was on its second weekend of release.

It fizzled quickly from there and, all told, made just $37.9 million domestically to go with $67.4 million internationally for a grand total of $105.3 million worldwide. After theaters took their cut, MGM and Miramax were out a lot of money. Keep in mind, the $80 million-plus budget didn't account for marketing costs.

"I've never been in a situation like that," Matt Damon said in a 2005 interview with Time. "Terry was spitting rage at the system, at the Weinsteins. You can't try and impose big compromises on a visionary director like him. If you try to force him to do what you want creatively, he'll go nuclear."

In the end, it was an unhappy marriage between director and studio heads that resulted in a costly misfire.

You can grab "The Brothers Grimm" on Blu-ray or DVD from Amazon.