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Celebrities Who Tried To Destroy Someone’s Career

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Some Hollywood grudges don’t stay backstage — they end careers.

Nicki Swift’s rundown of “Celebrities Who Tried To Destroy Someone’s Career” skips the usual tabloid noise and goes straight for the paper trail: broken phone calls, slashed paychecks, and firings ordered from the top. Two segments carry the video — the Terrence Howard-Robert Downey Jr. fallout over the Iron Man franchise, and the Michael Bay-Megan Fox blowup that got her cut from Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Both end the same way: one star walks away with the franchise, the other gets replaced.

• Terrence Howard says his Iron Man salary was cut from a promised $8 million to $1 million for the sequel, and Robert Downey Jr. didn’t return his calls for three months — Howard was replaced by Don Cheadle.
• Megan Fox told Wonderland magazine in 2009 that Michael Bay wanted to be “like Hitler on his sets,” and Steven Spielberg had her fired from Transformers: Dark of the Moon shortly after.
• The video also covers “So not cute” (1:31), “Not-so-smooth sailing” (2:10), and “One bitter divorce” (4:32) — cases where exes used industry leverage to stall a former partner’s career after a split.

The Iron Man Pay Cut

Terrence Howard’s version of the story starts with sacrifice. He says he agreed to a reduced salary on the original 2008 Iron Man specifically to help get Robert Downey Jr. — then still climbing back from well-documented career trouble — cast in the lead role. The arrangement was supposed to set both actors up for bigger paydays down the line as the franchise grew.

It didn’t work out that way. When it came time to negotiate Iron Man 2, Howard says Marvel cut his offered salary from $8 million down to $1 million, a reduction he believes was made to free up more money for Downey’s own payout. Howard says he tried reaching Downey directly to sort it out and got nothing — three months of silence. He walked, and Don Cheadle stepped into the role of James “Rhodey” Rhodes for the rest of the franchise.

Transformers: Retaliation

Megan Fox’s exit from the Transformers series traces back to a single quote. In a 2009 interview with Wonderland magazine, timed around Revenge of the Fallen, Fox described director Michael Bay’s set as run by someone who “wants to be like Hitler on his sets.” It was blunt, it was public, and it stuck.

Bay later said the comment reached executive producer Steven Spielberg, who ordered Fox off Transformers: Dark of the Moon not long after it ran. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley took over the female lead for the third film, and Fox spent the next several years publicly clarifying and walking back the remark — a saga chronicled in more detail in Inside Megan Fox’s Relationship History.

He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he really argues with his DPs a lot.

Other Backstage Sabotage

The rest of the video moves through smaller but no less pointed cases of industry payback. “So not cute” at 1:31 and “Not-so-smooth sailing” at 2:10 cover interpersonal friction that spilled into professional consequences, while “One bitter divorce” at 4:32 lays out how a split partner used industry connections and clout to stall a former spouse’s opportunities. None of the names get the runtime Howard or Fox do, but the pattern is the same throughout — someone with leverage used it, and someone else paid for it professionally. It’s the kind of dynamic covered at length in Actors Who Treat Their Co-Stars Like Trash.

What ties Howard’s and Fox’s stories together is that neither ever got the apology tour. Cheadle went on to play Rhodey through Avengers: Infinity War, and Huntington-Whiteley’s one Transformers outing was her last with the franchise — the roles moved on, the grudges didn’t.