(Credits: All-Pro Reels)
Thu 27 November 2025 20:15, UK
It’s quite impressive to have a movie that’s known as a spectacularly expensive box office flop, like Waterworld, for instance or John Carter, but it’s even more impressive, I would say, is to have made a massive box office flop that people can’t even remember, like 2005’s Sahara starring everyone’s favourite pseudo-intellectual southern American Matthew McConaughey.
Ask anyone you like and the chances are they will have absolutely no recollection of the action adventure film that also featured Penelope Cruz and William H Macy in the tale of a treasure hunter who partners with a World Health Organisation doctor to locate a steam-propelled warship in the Sahara desert.
It’s a wonder nobody put the brakes on it once that elevator pitch was spouted at a no doubt drunken Hollywood industry lunch, but lo and behold, it somehow got put into development and somebody signed off on an $80million budget for the film, which by the time they were done filming in Morocco and London had actually doubled to an eye-watering $160m.
McConaughey plays the hero, of course, Dirk Pitt, who was the star of the original novels on which Sahara was based, written in 1992 by Clive Cussler, and the Texan was apparently such a big fan that he waited years and years to get the opportunity to play the globe-trotting adventurer.
At the time, he said, “I liked him because he (Pitt) was a full-on Renaissance guy, man. Ten years ago, I was saying, ‘Where’s the character that could wrestle the bear in the morning and dance with the queen the same night? Where’s the guy who could sit down and talk with the president and be a scientist at 11 o’clock on Monday, and at noon, be across the street in the bar, dealing gold bullion with the smugglers,’ y’know? All without changing clothes or whatever, just in the same day.’”
Well, apparently the answer to that question is that…oh wait, he’s not done… “Where’s the guy who would rather be a lover than a fighter, but when it’s time to fight, he can kick some ass and also get his ass kicked? Which he does. Which I do a lot,” he continued.
The answer to that, Matthew, is apparently that even when you do find him, the result is a risible movie that costs far, far too much to make and nobody goes to see. And just to give you an example of the waste that was going on in the production of Sahara, one action sequence alone that lasted just 46 seconds cost $2m to make, and then wasn’t even used in the film.
It was originally intended to be the first in a Bond-style franchise, but the poor box office response soon put paid to that. It didn’t do McConaughey’s career any harm, though, as we know, he quickly moved on to doing a couple of romantic comedies over the next few years before he had a massive 2010s, thanks to films like Dallas Buyers Club, Interstellar and Magic Mike, plus an acclaimed turn in HBO’s True Detective.
This year, he released a book of prayers and poems, which sounds absolutely insufferable, and he’ll soon be back on screen with Woody Harrelson in Brothers, a fictional documentary following the pair living on a Texas ranch.
Related Topics
