(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 8 October 2025 14:45, UK
Having enjoyed a career that’s experienced its fair share of ups and downs, there’s almost something poetic about the worst movie Michael Keaton has ever made making a massive impact on Hollywood.
It wasn’t intentional, and in an ideal world, audiences will see sense and let bad films bomb. In this case, the opposite happened, and it opened the doors to studios and producers capitalising on one of the industry’s most infamous dumping grounds to see if they could recreate the magic.
Unfortunately for those who enjoy their motion pictures to be at least half decent, they did, and all of a sudden, a period where nobody wanted to release anything became fertile ground for pictures that everybody could spot from a mile away would be bad, but at least they had a chance of making money.
Keaton already had experience of shaking Tinseltown to its foundations when he headlined Tim Burton’s Batman, but Geoffrey Sax’s 2005 supernatural slog, White Noise, was a different kettle of shite. It’s the only horror flick the Academy Award nominee has ever appeared in, and it also happens to be the single worst-reviewed entry in his filmography, which says a lot when he also starred in First Daughter and was billed below Ally McCoist in A Shot at Glory.
Despite being unanimously panned and arriving in cinemas in the first week of January, where movies are sent out to die, White Noise was an unqualified success that recouped its budget more than ten times over at the box office, setting a collective lightbulb off in the heads of executives around town, with Universal boss Adam Fogelson explaining why.
“If you really examined the date, there are very few reasons other than historical behaviour why almost any film can’t work on almost any weekend,” he said. “There are any number of things. The first weekend in January used to be a non-starter for people; we had this little horror movie, White Noise, that did business, and that has become a place where movies like that tend to operate.”
What he means by “movies like that” are crap horror films. Suddenly, thanks to Keaton’s White Noise, dropping critic-proof slashers, stabbers, and chillers in the first week of January became a strategy unto itself, with Eli Roth’s Hostel capitalising the very next year, which was a double dose of bad news when it also assisted in ushering in the torture porn era.
In the years that followed, One Missed Call, one of the worst horror remakes of all time, The Devil Inside, with one of the worst endings of all time, Nicolas Cage’s diabolical Season of the Witch, and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones all debuted during the first week of January and did a turn among ticket buyers, and technically, it’s all Michael Keaton’s fault.
It’s been 20 years since White Noise, and the trend shows no signs of abating, with Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, Night Swim, M3GAN, and The Devil Conspiracy using the early days of the new year as their launching pad, and the one thing that continues to unite them is that almost all of them are rubbish.
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