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The Movie That Ruined John Travolta’s Acting Career

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Updated on July 6, 2023

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John Travolta’s career has been marked by ups and downs, with him sitting at the top of Hollywood’s A-list at some point, as well as at the bottom of the B-list. The iconic actor rose to prominence in the mid-70s with appearances in “Welcome Back, Kotter” and Brian de Palma’s beloved 1976 horror film “Carrie.” Travolta became a cultural phenomenon just a few years later, thanks to the one-two big screen punch of 1977’s “Saturday Night Fever” and 1978’s “Grease,” in which he danced and sang his way into the pop-culture pantheon.

Much of Travolta’s goodwill from those films had dissipated by the mid-80s, as the actor had not appeared in another success for a long time. Even after 1989’s “Look Who’s Talking” appeared to repair Travolta’s leaking career ship, the next several years saw another succession of uninspired big-screen performances. Then, apparently against all odds, Travolta returned to form in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece “Pulp Fiction,” with a show-stopping performance. Following the success of that picture, Travolta quickly rose to prominence as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors, starring in some of the decade’s biggest hits.

However, by the year 2000, his career had slowed dramatically, and he possessed little star power, especially in comparison to his earlier clout as a performer. Despite this, he was successful in getting funding for his passion project, a feature-length adaptation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s book “Battlefield Earth.”

“Battlefield Earth,” starring Barry Pepper (“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”) and the aforementioned Travolta, is the story of humanity’s overthrow of their extraterrestrial oppressors a millennia after the Psychlo race first took over the planet.

Battlefield Earth takes place in the year 3,000, when Earth has been reduced to a barren wasteland.

Regardless of personal or professional considerations, anyone who has seen “Battlefield Earth” knows it more than lives up to its harsh critique. Ultimately, Travolta and his team generated a product so bafflingly incompetent that “Battlefield Earth” is consistently ranked among the worst films ever made.

JD Shapiro, one of the film’s writers, has already expressed his hatred for the project, calling his script “the worst script ever.”

He once wrote, “It wasn’t as I intended – promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.”

There are far too many issues with this film to cover in one sitting, but suffice it to say that its ineptness justifies its place among the pantheon of the worst films ever made.

In 2019, Travolta remains a pop culture magnet, a man who can dazzle festival goers, schmooze chat-show hosts, and proudly flaunt his chrome-domed noggin in a popular Pitbull video. He even gave a speech at the MTV Video Music Awards this year. But the Travolta that fans remember—the one they want—is the one from classics like Grease and Face/Off, not the man who makes Redbox-friendly dirt-car films like Trading Paint.

His current movie star status is so low that even Gotti, a comeback vehicle Travolta cultivated for nearly a decade and painstakingly promoted, failed to make more than $5 million and received a rare 0 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. Still, it’s a minor marvel that Gotti made it to theaters at all, given Travolta’s previous track record: The last Travolta-starring film to launch on more than a thousand screens was 2012’s Savages.