A Failed Sci-Fi Movie Based On A Board Game Reunited Two Friday Night Lights Stars

The Dillon Panthers' motto of "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose," might've what got the team through in "Friday Night Lights," but it wasn't enough for two of the show's stars when they teamed up in a sci-fi box office flop in 2012. Back when Hollywood and Hasbro were riding high on the success of the damage-fueled "Transformers" franchise, the toy company gave up the rights to another of its most popular products when Paramount decided to make a film based on the board game "Battleship." Peter Berg, who was a producer on "Friday Night Lights," was at the helm of the movie that starred a pair of the show's alumni, Taylor Kitsch (who also stars in Prime Video's "The Terminal List") and Jesse Plemons, who played Tim Riggins and Landry Clarke, respectively, on the show. The movie also starred Alexander Skarsgård, Liam Neeson, and Rihanna, in her first acting role.

With such a star-studded cast and the booming success made from certain robots in disguise, hopes were high that "Battleship" would be just as much of a hit, and it even had the monstrous $209 million budget to help get it there. Unfortunately, the film's $303 million box office gross landed it among the biggest box office bombs of all-time due to bringing in just $65 million domestically. But what prevented this movie from being a big summer action movie in 2012? Well, according to critics, the biggest miss was in the movie's story, or lack thereof. 

Given that it arrived at a time when audiences were lapping up giant alien robots beating the bolts out of one another, you'd think that something like "Battleship," which saw a small band of warships fight a fleet of alien vessels, would be just as welcome. That absolutely wasn't the case, as critics delivered direct hits to the film, which sank on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 33%. Claudia Puig of USA Today said, "Mostly, 'Battleship' is a noisy, overlong and numbing military vs. aliens saga with laughably bad dialogue."

Thankfully, even with all of its issues, most of the cast managed to jump ship in time with their careers intact, but Berg later admitted that the project changed how he would handle work in the future. In an interview with the New York Times following the film's release, he said, "I got a taste of a film's global power [with 'Hancock']. But I discounted the effect of Will Smith on Hancock's success. I thought I could pull off 'Battleship' without a big star ... I don't want to tackle that kind of economic project for quite a while."

This cinematic setback in 2012 didn't affect the work partnership between Berg and Kitsch. Kitsch was in Berg's 2013 "Lone Survivor," and the two teamed up once again in 2025 for Netflix's dark and gritty western show, "American Primeval."