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Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

If Gigli is a notable bomb, commercially and critically, then Cleopatra is the king, queen, and emperor of all bombs. The numbers these days don’t sound so shocking of course: Cleopatra, the 1963 historical epic, was made for $44 million and made $26 million. What’s more, it won four Academy Awards. How bad can that be? Well, try to imagine Avatar making, worldwide, something around $200 million as opposed to nearly $3 billion. A lot of advance hype did no favors for Cleopatra, a movie that was plagued with as much negative press as positive. On the one hand, it was bringing together the power couple of the era: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. On the other hand, there was much talk about their relationship constantly being on the rocks.

Though Taylor and Burton would end up getting married after the film was released - though they eventually broke up - the tabloid stories didn’t garner enough interest among audiences across the country. Cleopatra is known today as much as Gigli is for being a flop, but as I mentioned above, movies have flopped harder and more dramatically. The difference here is that, unlike some recent big-budget films like Titanic or Avatar, the film failed. Those latter films succeeded, beyond everyone’s expectations. Cleopatra, partly because it was so long, so bloated, had so many reshoots and rewrites, and had so much turmoil between the lead couple that didn’t translate to the big screen, wasn’t so lucky. Taylor and Burton reunited onscreen a few years later with a much more successful film about a couple: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Turned out people wanted the turmoil more than sexual chemistry.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall

May-December romances aren’t as shocking as we might think. When we get inflamed at older men romancing younger women, most people get incensed and angry. Though everyone’s pretty much accepted it by now, when Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones publicly got involved in a relationship, it was relatively scandalous. There’s a 30-year age difference between the two of them, even if Douglas has always managed to play and look a lot younger than he is (he’s 65 and only with the sad news that he’s got throat cancer did he ever look close to his age). Now, with over a decade passing since their relationship began, Douglas and Zeta-Jones are accepted. But for the original May-December romance in Hollywood, look no further than Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Bogie and Bacall starred in a few films together; most notable were The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not.

Bogie and Bacall met when filming To Have and Have Not; at the time of the film’s release, Bogart was 44 and Bacall was 19. The age difference is roughly the same, but imagine, if you will, a couple of years from now when Hugh Jackman announces that he’s in a relationship with Miley Cyrus. Our jaws will drop, of course, but there would be plenty of hand-wringing (appropriate and otherwise) about the age difference and about how young she is. Bacall managed, even from the tender age of 19, to seem smarter, sexier, and sultrier than a teenager could ever be. Watch her in To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep, and you’ll think she’s older than her age - what’s more, that wouldn’t be anything close to an insult. Bogart was a charmer, if not a fine specimen of manliness. But you can see what each saw in the other, both on and off the screen.

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