By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Back when he was stealing scenes in the original Scream movie, it seemed like Matthew Lillard was destined to be Hollywood’s next big A-lister. Flash forward to the modern day, though, and he is mostly known for his voice acting and convention appearances. Many of his fans have wondered what happened with his career, and the actor has a surprising theory: he blames his Hollywood downfall on the box office failure of Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.
In a recent interview with Business Insider, Matthew Lillard said, “I thought I’d be No. 1 on the call sheet for the next 10 years of movies” after that second film featuring the Scooby gang dropped. “And the reality was the exact opposite happened,” he said. This basically killed his dreams of being an A-lister, and he had to eventually re-examine his priorities as an actor thanks to the film’s failure.
The Failure Of Scooby-Doo 2
By today’s standards, the box office failure that doomed Matthew Lillard’s A-lister hopes seems pretty mild: against a budget of $25-$80 million, this Scooby sequel earned $181.2 million. Compared to the recent failure of Warner Bros. films like The Flash and Joker 2, that kind of middling performance seems very mild. However, the first film earned WB $275.7 million against a budget of $84 million, so this sequel was a major franchise disappointment, bringing in nearly $100 million less than its predecessor.
Making things worse is the fact that Scooby-Doo 2 was absolutely reviled by critics. Rotten Tomatoes has a 22 percent critical rating, with the critical consensus boiling down to the fact that, unlike the first film, only very young and immature children will appreciate this second outing. The film was awful enough to earn the word kind of award: a Razzie for Worst Remake or Sequel.
Matthew Lillard’s Amazing Attitude
As for Matthew Lillard, he looks back on all of this with a rather Zen perspective, noting that he was previously “caught up in the success of what I was doing…caught up in the parts I was getting…caught up in this drive to be quote-unquote famous.” When the Scooby sequel failed and ground his career ambitions to a halt, he stopped aggressively chasing this level of fame.
Putting things in perspective, Matthew Lillard recalls an opportunity to appear on Dancing With the Stars, and he realized that appearing on something so silly would effectively kill his chances of ever bringing home an Academy Award. To this end, he told his agent what his updated priorities were now and why he was turning down his chance at reality TV stardom. “I’ll be famous and not a great actor, and I really just wanted to be a great actor.”
Shaggy For A New Generation
In many ways, this perseverance paid off: rather than disown Scooby-Doo, Matthew Lillard became the voice actor for Shaggy in a number of animated features. Like Mark Hamill before him, the Scream veteran embraced a killer career in voice acting, winning over a new legion of fans. And the pivot to voice acting hasn’t kept him from getting great live-action roles in serious movies (like the Oscar-winning The Descendents) and silly movies (like Five Nights at Freddy’s).
Honestly, we’ve been huge fans of Matthew Lillard since the first Scream, and we can confirm he is somehow even more charming in person than he is on the silver screen. It’s tough not to sympathize with his A-lister dreams dying, but it’s nice that he made peace with embracing a different path as an actor. Given how great he is in just about everything (particularly David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), we can only hope to see even more of Lillard’s delightfully off-kilter performances in the very near future.
Source: Business Insider