Inside the Sad Tale of John Travolta's Hollywood Downfall After One of His Latest Movies Only Made $171 at Box Office

OK! can reveal John Travolta is confronting a brutal new low in a career once defined by superstardom, after his latest film struggled to register at the box office – reigniting debate over how one of Hollywood's most bankable actors has lost his way.

Travolta, 71, most recently starred in High Rollers, a low-budget action thriller following a retired master thief forced back into crime after his wife is kidnapped.

Once an actor who commanded $20 million per film, Travolta now appears almost exclusively in projects like these that barely receive theatrical releases and are mauled by critics.

It comes after his 2023 crime film Mob Land made only £125 at the British box office, equivalent to $171, after it opened in just three theaters.

Industry observers tell us the collapse of his once-stellar career has been years in the making.

While Travolta is hardly the first aging star to accept weaker material, Hollywood insiders believe his recent choices have been shaped by his association with producer Randall Emmett, 54, who has been accused of sexual misconduct, which he denies, and whose work has been criticized for prioritizing speed and cost-cutting over quality.

Since allegations against him emerged in a 2022 Los Angeles Times investigation and a subsequent Hulu documentary, Emmett has begun using his middle name, Ives, professionally.

The Guardian's review of High Rollers offered a withering assessment.

After noting Travolta had finally abandoned his long-rumored hairpieces, the paper branded the project a "heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can't help but guffaw."

Its review added: "The air of tawdry cost-cutting pervades every level of the film, from the casting to the costumes to the paste jewellery that's supposed to stand in for posh gemstones."

High Rollers was so poorly received that it even failed to earn enough reviews to be rated on Rotten Tomatoes. Only nine critics bothered to watch it.

Similar indifference greeted Speed Kills in 2018, which scored 0 percent on the site, a feat Travolta repeated the same year with Gotti, in which he played mob boss John Gotti.

None of this erases Travolta's extraordinary highs.

A high school dropout from New Jersey, he broke through via musical theater and television before becoming a global sensation at 24 with Saturday Night Fever in 1977 and Grease in 1978.

Rolling Stone declared he "will be revered forever, in the manner of Elvis, James Dean, (and) Marilyn Monroe."

His 1994 comeback in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction earned him an Oscar nomination and restored him to the A-list.

That revival proved fleeting.

Scientology devotee Travolta's passion project Battlefield Earth, released in 2000 and based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, was widely ridiculed and later voted the worst film ever made by IMDb users.

Many in the industry believe his reputation never fully recovered.

Personal tragedy has compounded the professional decline. Travolta's son Jett died in 2009 at 16, and his wife Kelly Preston died in 2020 at 57 after a battle with b----- cancer. Despite this, Travolta has continued to work relentlessly.

One movie industry source said: "If John had stepped away after Pulp Fiction, his legacy would be untouchable – a perfect second act that sealed his place among Hollywood's true greats."

Instead, by staying in the game for too long and choosing the wrong projects, he has diluted that achievement and begun to feel like someone who missed the moment to leave while the applause was still there."