Megan Fox says 'Jennifer's Body' never stood a chance due to media image after 'Transformers'

Jennifer’s Body “never really stood a chance” at the box office due to the way Megan Fox was portrayed in the media after Transformers, the actor has claimed.

The 34-year-old star appeared on Eli Roth’s podcast History of Horror: Uncut (reported via IndieWire) to discuss the reaction to director Karyn Kusama’s 2009 movie and its recent reappraisal as an underrated genre classic.

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Fox said she feels good about the “nice circle” of the movie’s response over the years, praising Kusama and writer Diablo Cody for what they produced.

She said: “All these people put in a lot of hard work into making a really quality project that was panned for reasons that had nothing to do with them.

Watch: Learn more about Jennifer’s Body

“A lot of it was just about my image at the time and who I was in the media at the time and the backlash to that. The movie never really stood a chance.”

Fox said the movie’s press tour coincided with her widely publicised fall-out with Michael Bay, who directed her in two Transformers movies.

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“I was being vilified a little bit when the movie was getting ready for its release,” she said.

“That [fall-out with Bay] happened right when I was on the press tour for Jennifer’s Body. I think it all sort of exploded at once.

“I think people definitely viewed me as negative or having bad intentions or just being really shallow and selfish, if it could be reduced and simplified even to that.”

In Jennifer’s Body, Fox portrayed a demonically possessed high school girl who was killing her male classmates, with Amanda Seyfried as her best friend.

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It earned only $32m (£25m) at the global box office and has just a 45% approval score among film critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie has since been reappraised, though, as a feminist work, particularly in the wake of the Me Too movement.