Ryan Reynolds isn't famous, and that's ok.

Someone just had a very very bad weekend. Both Reynold's vehicles Turbo and RIPD bombed miserably to what is essentially the best horror film in about a decade. Normally I'd be pretty pleased with those numbers, but this is still spectacularly unfair. Is RIPD as bad as they say? Probably. Was a movie about a formula 1 snail the result of some sort of executive dart board/madlib concoction? Again... probably.

I like Ryan Reynolds, I think he gets a lot more crap than he deserves. I also think any unknown actor saddled with The Green Lantern would be begging for change on Hollywood and Vine right now. How does he do that? How does he keep getting these golden tickets? I have no friggin' clue. It wasn't to make a competing Ryan Gosling, he showed up later and even he doesn't hit the mark most of the time. Damn, where's celebrity death match when you really need it?

Someone out there clearly wants this man to be a bankable movie star, and the frustrating part is he's talented enough to pull it off. But you can't force these things all the time and you definitely can't run two of his films in the same damn weekend. I don't care that one's animated and one isn't, you could argue it's after the same audience. I mean, I saw Men in Black when I was in second grade (god, I loved it).

Yet the saddest thing of all is even if you put both of those movies together you wind up with a middling profit. Ryan Reynolds does not draw a crowd. It's as simple as that, I wish it weren't true, but there it is. But then again, Will Smith couldn't this summer, neither could Tom cruise, even Brad Pitt's taking a hit on his liberal interpretation of World War Z. Maybe I'm coming at this at the wrong angle. Maybe stars have less to do with the box office than we all thought.

Or maybe we're just sick of interchangeable Dreamworks cartoons, MIB ripoffs, and pretentious apocalypses.