Do we really need to recap what went wrong with The Canyons? We do? Ugh, all right fine, but I’m going to do abbreviated version: Lindsay Lohan was hired as the lead on The Canyons during her mess days. Her bad behavior on the set becomes huge news. The Canyons eventually gets released, and critics panned it, but didn’t necessarily shred it. If anything, the acting was one of the high points for most critics. Well, writer Bret Easton Ellis has gone on the record after the fact, saying that casting LiLo is the reason why the movie did so poorly. RadarOnline reports…
“I think where we went wrong was with the casting of Lindsay Lohan. Now I don’t mean she wasn’t good in it, she was very good in the movie. I mean that suddenly The Canyons has become the Lindsay Lohan film,” Ellis said on Monday during his podcast. “And Lindsay’s reputation followers her everywhere. And the moment that we casted Lindsay Lohan, the movie became something else. It stopped becoming the DIY movie that could make it into part of the trainwreck of the Lindsay Lohan narrative. And we thought the movie was ultimately going to step out of that shadow, that it was going to speak for itself and that people would be more interested in how we made this movie … but we didn’t. We didn’t step out of the Lindsay Lohan shadow, and it did affect the way the movie was perceived.”
Look, we’re not going to defend what Lindsay did back then because, well, it was super sh!tty. That being said, I don’t think you can put the blame entirely on her. It was an indie movie (those aren’t exactly cash cows) that got ravaged by the critics (also not helping) and a lot of the marketing cast it in a pretty insular light. I’m not going to say Lindsay helped the cause, but let’s be real: There was a lot more wrong than just Lindsay.