Tom Sizemore has 28 more posthumous projects

I didn't do an "in memoriam" piece for Tom Sizemore when he died earlier this year. As you would know, I don't write them for a lot of people, even some genuinely great actors or directors, if I didn't feel a special connection to them. If I felt obligated to be the blog of record on deaths of movie industry people, that's all I'd be writing. 

With Sizemore, it wasn't even a consideration, because he wasn't a very good guy. I'm not going to refresh my memory on what made him not a very good guy right now. I don't need to go out of my way to speak ill of the dead.

The reason I'm speaking of him at all is something outrageous I saw when I went to his IMDB page yesterday.

If you read yesterday's post on Blue Steel, you would know the reason I was doing Sizemore research. I wanted to see how many other Kathryn Bigelow films he had appeared in. As it turned out, it was two.

Due to a (fairly) recent redesign, IMDB now segments projects by what have already been released ("Previous") and what have yet to be unveiled ("Upcoming"). 

As my eyes drifted upward to the "Upcoming" section for Sizemore, I saw the absurd number 28 appearing there.

Now, it's customary for an actor who dies while still working to have two, three, four, even five projects yet to be released. Checking out this section can be a comfort to us as we try to determine how many more chances we have to savor work of theirs we've never seen.

But 28?

The number is high on its own, but it's even higher considering that I don't remember the last time I've seen Tom Sizemore in something new. In fact, just now I bemusedly scrolled back through, what, a hundred titles? in order to find the last one I'd seen. That was 19 years ago with Paparazzi, which is in my bottom 40 films on Flickchart. That was the kind of career Sizemore had.

And except for the fact that he's just a lesser celebrity than those I'm about to mention, we'd probably be more familiar with the fact that he'd gone the route of guys like John Travolta and Bruce Willis, appearing in whatever straight-to-video schlock someone was willing to consider casting them in. The other reason for my bemusement was just how few of the titles I recognized -- almost none in the past ten years, except for TV shows. 

This sort of indifference to where his money was coming from is, of course, why Sizemore had loaned his mug to so many movies that have not yet been completed or released. If I remember some of the vague, unsavory details of his life correctly, he needed the money due to repeatedly blowing it all. 

The crazy thing is the four-letter word in the subject of this post that I should draw your attention to: "more." Given that he already has nine 2023 credits in his "Previous" section on IMDB, it's likely that at least five of them, probably more, were released since his death in early March. So if you'd gone to his IMDB that day, you might have seen 33 pending projects instead of 28.

Alas, none of those projects serve that ideal function for when someone beloved passes. I have no inclination to savor anything else that may still be coming from Tom Sizemore. If I do one day decide to reappraise him, I'll of course have plenty of other unseen movies to choose from.