“Geezer Teasers”: The Genre That’s Pumped Out 14 Bruce Willis Films in Two Years
After hearing that Bruce Wilis will be retiring from acting due to his diagnosis of aphasia, a degenerative disease, I started to look over his movies, and found that just in the two years, he's starred in fourteen films, which sent me down a rabbit hole, because I didn't remember seeing promotions for a single one!
Apparently, there's this entirely underground genre of movies that you can go ahead and blame for the recent slew of bad Bruce Willis movies, like the ones nominated for their own category of Razzie, "Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie."
Geezer Teasers, as they're called, are feature movies that are essentially used as placeholders for video services that essentially help everyone involved but the viewer.
The format is taking big-name A-List actors, like Bruce Willis, Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, 50 Cent, Val Kilmer, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, and more, and crapping out a movie in a short amount of time.
Actors, like Willis, are paid $1M for a day's worth of work, in what's almost more like an extended Cameo than an acting role. The directors get paid of course, but also the credit of working with "A-List" actors.
A YouTube-documentary from RedLetterMedia, dove into this topic through the lens of following the nearly dozen movies a year that Willis takes part of, and found that there's more to there just being "Bad movies."
Behind it all, is a guy named Randall Emmett, who's best known as a producer on films like 2 Gun, Silence, Lone Survivor, and The Irishman, but has 123 producer credits, thanks to the Geezer Teaser genre, grossing over $1.2 Billion.
It would seem that thanks to Emmett, the men who once ran Hollywood are now almost covertly working in the underbelly of the industry, being paid very well to appear in these very bad movies.
The selling point for the movies to streaming services is the cover art featuring the stars to fill the library up to appear to give the user a "Variety of options" to watch. Think back to Blockbuster days, where there was a full movie store, but there were really only about 20 movies that you'd want to see.
"It's got Bruce Willis AND 50 Cent. It HAS to be good."
Willis is one of the more widely used actors to star in these films. When I say "star," I mean a glorified Cameo.
You pay $1M for two days to work with Willis, but there's a "Hard Out." You have to shoot every single scene with him in one day. When he gets off of his plane, that's when the clock starts, and when that clock strikes hour eight, he's done.
A guy named Joshua Hart wrote a piece for Vulture, where he discusses that he was turned on to the genre by a producer, named Adam Champ. He discussed Willis being the top of this "game."
"With Bruce Willis, there's almost a model for how he features in these movies," Champ told the Vulture writer. "You have Bruce Willis at the intro of the movie, so people are like, 'Great, this is a Bruce Willis movie,' but he's actually a secondary character who shows up sporadically."
In some of these movies, where he's the "star," he doesn't even clock ten minutes.
In the movie Hard Kill, where Willis is billed second, with his face the biggest on the poster, he appears for a total of seven minutes.
In his film Extraction, released in 2015, he spends less than nine minutes on your screen.
He puts in such little effort, to the point where it would appear that he puts in the bare minimum of work, to where he wears an earpiece to have someone feed him his lines during filming.
RedLetterMedia point this out in their video, near the 24-minute mark.
If you figure Willis makes $1M a movie for one day's worth of work, over the course of the decade, this is a money machine. Willis would have brought in tens of millions just working with this EFO Films company behind the Geezer Teasers. It sounds like a good retirement plan, especially if he knew that a battle with aphasia would bring him to the point of being forced into retirement.
It Willis is the king of Geezer Teasers, and we're starting to see other names like Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, 50 Cent, Val Kilmer, Steven Seagal, and Sylvester Stallone, we're looking at a future for actors who are on the edge of their prime, looking to make a few extra bucks before they call it a day.
Read more at Vulture