The movie Elijah Wood wants to delete from history: “Heinous and terrifying”

Posted On January 15, 2026January 15, 2026

If you could delete one film from history, which would it be?

Michael Bay’s entire back catalogue? All the Exorcist reboots? Battlefield Earth? The Love Guru? Why can we only pick one? There are many actors who have expressed the desire to wipe at least one title off their filmography, but sadly, they are rarely the ones who are the absolute worst offenders.

Yes, Hugh Jackman does owe the world a goddamn apology for Movie 43, in which he played a man who has giant testicles protruding from his neck, but he has a lot less to be sorry for than, say, Steven Seagal. 

When it comes to Elijah Wood, there are certainly a few contenders. There was that terrible 2015 movie, The Last Witch Hunter, in which Vin Diesel played an ancient witch-murdering warrior, and that interminably dull and unnecessary Flipper remake in the 1990s that somehow managed to be even less enjoyable than the first. But when asked in 2017 to name which movie he would like to erase from existence, Wood chose one that he had nothing to do with – Tim Burton’s 2005 remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

“Most remakes inherently don’t justify their existence,” the Lord of the Rings actor pointed out, noting that, if you’re going to do it anyway, you have to make something that is either better than the original or completely different from it. “That film did none of that,” he argued. “If anything, it destroyed the book, and it destroyed the film. It contained no magic.” 

That’s quite an accusation for a Burton film. You can accuse the Edward Scissorhands director of many things, but lacking magic is not one of them, at least if we’re grouping magic together with imagination and whimsy. Even if you hate the guy, you can’t deny that Burton is up to his ears in dark whimsy.

Unfortunately, his completely uncalled-for adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic story uses all that to bad ends. Johnny Depp, who was well and truly into his post-Pirates of the Caribbean showboat era, took it upon himself to claim the entire film, and it’s a bit of a disaster as a result.

Wood called Depp’s rendition of the mysterious factory owner “heinous and terrifying and molest-y and strange,” and completely lacking in beauty and purity. Sure, Gene Wilder made sure to portray the character as a bit of a huckster, but by the end of the movie, you are still in awe of him. Depp just spends the entire movie chewing scenery, leering at nothing in particular, and appearing to give a performance pitched directly at the adults in the audience who are only there because of their kids.

It is not the worst of Depp’s vanity projects, of course. That distinction belongs to the 2015 atrocity Mortdecai, but it was a big miss when you consider how beloved the book and the original film are, and while some people liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they are almost certainly the people who willingly showed up for the fourth instalment of the Pirates movies just to see him do Jack Sparrow again. For those who were in it for the story, there was little to like and a lot to shudder about.

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