Credit: Far Out / Alamy
Tue 28 July 2026 17:45, UK
They might have a history of pulling pranks on each other any chance they get, but Brad Pitt will always be honest with George Clooney and vice versa, with the former telling the latter that he had a flop on his hands. Funnily enough, he was right.
At this point, Clooney’s career is basically unkillable. If an A-lister could be deposed by a flop or two, then he’d have lost his spot a long time ago, because as both an actor and a filmmaker, he’s weathered his fair share of critical and commercial failures, but he’s always able to bounce back.
Despite what Quentin Tarantino might think, much to the two-time Academy Award winner’s chagrin, Clooney is still a movie star, and one of the benefits that comes with being a movie star is that you can take big risks, bigger swings, and still be able to live to fight another day when they blow up in your face.
As well as co-starring in multiple films together, Pitt and Clooney have both branched out to different degrees on the other side of the camera. The worst Batman in big-screen history is the more diverse of the two by far, though, having gathered eight Oscar nods in six different categories to underline his versatility as a jack of all trades and coffee salesman extraordinaire.
Shortly after reaching the pinnacle of his career, Clooney was brought crashing back down to earth. Alongside Pitt, fittingly, Ocean’s Eleven was the biggest box office hit he’d ever been in, and he followed it up with his acclaimed feature-length directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
Fancying something a bit more esoteric as a palate-cleanser, he reunited with Ocean’s director Steven Soderbergh for the daunting task of remaking Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal 1972 sci-fi, Solaris. On paper, it was a movie that didn’t need to exist, and in practice, it was still a movie that didn’t need to exist.
It was far from being a bad film, but a slow, ponderous, and introspective space drama didn’t appeal to the cinemagoing public, leaving it to float away into the orbit of commercial nothingness. At the premiere, when Clooney was at his most confident, Pitt had some harsh words for his old pal.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“At the end of it, Brad just looks at me, and he goes… Brad Pitt came to the premiere, and he looks at me, and goes, ‘Good luck with this one!’” Clooney recalled. “He loved the film, but he was like, ‘It appeals to like eight people’. But that’s the thing that was fun.” It was more than eight people, but not by much, with Solaris V2.0 falling well short of recouping its production costs in ticket sales.
After the crowd-pleasing, breezy Ocean’s, it was clear that when Clooney and Soderbergh reunited for their cosmic drama, it was the ‘one for us’ after the ‘one for them’ of their star-studded heist caper. In an ideal world, it would have appealed to everyone, but Pitt wasn’t even convinced that number would reach double figures.
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