For the most part, historical movies tend to root themselves firmly in the facts so as not to draw the ire of experts and purists. However, when you’re Roland Emmerich, you decide to rewrite the rules and deliver an incendiary thriller that leans heavily into conspiracy theories, only for Anonymous to flop as a result.
As you’d expect from a revisionist thriller that bases its entire narrative around the suspicions the Earl of Oxford was really the mastermind behind the plays of William Shakespeare, there was an outcry among the Bard’s most ardent defenders from the second the project was announced, and that carried right through the film’s eventual release.
Once Anonymous did land in theaters, though, nobody cared. Reviews were lukewarm at best, while it could only recoup half of its $30 million in ticket sales. There’s an old saying that controversy can always be relied upon to create cash, but that definitely wasn’t the case here, as hard as Emmerich tried on the promotional trail to needle the Shakespeare believers by repeatedly reiterating that there was no way he was the guy who penned many of the most legendary texts of all-time.
Cinema’s Master of Disaster would have made a much better argument had he told it in a film that was exciting, entertaining, or even remotely interesting. Instead, what we ended up with was a very boring tale of subterfuge, surreptitious dealings, and questionably accuracy that bordered on the outright comical, albeit in a forgotten flop that’s somehow ended up as a streaming success after FlixPatrol named Anonymous as one of Rakuten’s top-viewed features. Go figure.