Zeppie2022 said: ""I wish they'd just cast Broadway known people and trust the material."
Exactly!! They always seem to need to cast people they think will sell tickets and for the most part they are horrible. Nobody was worse IMO than Russell Crowe in Les Misérables movie."
Apparently, you have not seen/heard Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia! nor Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera. Although in Russell's case, he actually is an experienced rock singer. I've seen people make the argument that it was more of a factor of him not having the range to sing something like Les Miz. Nicole Ackman, who's my colleague at BroadwayWorld in our area of residence, once said on Twitter: "I don’t *love* Crowe’s Javert, but I don’t mind it. (I blame Hooper for my issues with the way the character is portrayed)".
If you actually look it up, Les Misérables was actually Russell's first time in a film that was a genuine box office hit since A Beautiful Mind 11 years earlier. I don't know if audiences for a while were kind of turned off by the troublemaking incidents he committed from him verbally abusing a producer after BAFTA in 2001 (which famously cost him a second consecutive Oscar) to throwing a telephone at a man in the Mercer Hotel in 2005. Although with Les Miz, that was an ensemble piece, so the marketing pressure wasn't all on him in particular.