By Joshua Tyler
| Published 21 seconds ago
Bruce Willis is one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a beloved figure, and by all accounts a really great guy. His health has been failing for years now, and it’s due to a slow, horrifically tragic illness. Everyone feels terrible about it, especially those closest to him.
Unfortunately, internet engagement farmers have now found a way to make the whole situation sadder by trying to destroy Bruce Willis’s biggest fans.
Bruce Willis knew what was happening to him years before it became debilitating. He reached a point where he was no longer able to perform the way he had at the height of his career. But the actor wanted to keep making money for his family.
So Willis signed up for a long string of low-budget direct-to-DVD movies that tricked fans into paying to watch them by putting Bruce’s face on the cover. Unfortunately, he was barely present in most of these movies, which were all utterly terrible.
At the time, no one knew about Bruce Willis’s health situation, so fans rightly called him out for participating in what was, basically, a fraud. In the absence of other information, they assumed he’d gotten greedy.
Now we know what was going on, and the whole thing is tragic. However, the hot new trend is shaming and attacking those Bruce Willis fans who, back then, tried to warn people about what those terrible movies really were, before they wasted their money on them.
And now, engagement farmers have taken advantage of that and begun rallying up a lynch mob to shame anyone who pointed out that, hey, maybe you shouldn’t spend your money on those terrible Bruce Willis cash-in movies.
Their argument seems to be that Willis was somehow entitled to participate in movie fraud because he was sick, and that anyone who called him out on it should be shamed in the town square. If that’s your point of view, leave now and never return.
What’s really tragic is that the people who called out Willis for making those movies are his biggest fans. We know that because they watched movies that looked this terrible, just because they thought he might be in them.
Now that they know Willis is ailing, those same people are also his biggest cheerleaders. They’re the ones leaving messages of support for his family and boosting them when they have an update.
What we should be doing, instead of somehow justifying movie ripoffs, is celebrating his best work. There’s a lot of it. Bruce Willis’s last great movie before he dove into the world of direct-to-DVD cash-ins was the time travel movie Looper. Maybe we should start right there.
Let’s celebrate his career and the amazing man he’s been. That’s where the Bruce Willis discussion should be pointed, not at each other.