The billion-dollar movie Peter Jackson refused to direct twice: “I already told you this”
If you’ve already directed a billion-dollar movie twice, can you really be arsed doing it again? If you’re Peter Jackson, then the answer is a resounding no; twice over, in fact.
As well as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sweeping the board at the Academy Awards to bring his monumental trilogy to a fitting close, the third and final chapter also became just the second film in cinema history to cross the fabled ten-figure threshold, after James Cameron’s Titanic.
Now that there’s 60 pictures in that club, it isn’t quite as exclusive as it once was. However, while there are now plenty of directors who’ve helmed a billion-dollar flick, doing it more than once is a rarer achievement, and something that only a select few can lay claim to.
There’s Cameron, obviously, who’s the only person to do it four times with Titanic and the first three Avatars. Zootopia‘s Byron Howard is the latest addition to the exclusive club after co-directing the two animated juggernauts, with the Russo brothers, Christopher Nolan, and Colin Trevorrow also on the list.
Thanks to The Return of the King and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Jackson has been breathing in that rarefied air for a while, but when he was presented with the opportunity to take the reins on another blockbuster that would sail past $1 billion in ticket sales, he couldn’t have made himself any clearer.
Well, maybe not the first time, but the second did the trick. There’s a bit of a cosmic coincidence to it all, too; of every director to have helmed at least two billion-dollar movies, James Wan is the only one of them who did it with two different franchises, steering the seventh Fast & Furious and Aquaman to success.
Had Jackson not been so resistant to Warner Bros’ overtures, then he’d have been the one to set that unique benchmark instead. “He said, ‘Are you a fan of Aquaman?'” he was asked by then-CEO Kevin Tsujihara. “I said, ‘No’. Six months later: ‘Peter, are you a fan of Aquaman?’ I said, ‘No, Kevin, I already told you this’. I’m not a superhero guy.”
Of all the ways to turn down the highest-grossing DC Comics adaptation of all time, and what’s currently the 33rd top-earning title in cinema history, “No, Kevin” has to be one of the funniest ways to go about it. “Look, films are hard,” Jackson explained. “I only want to make something that I have a deep passion for.”
Aquaman clearly wasn’t it, but Tintin looks as though it is. A decade and a half after Steven Spielberg’s original, Jackson is determined to finally live up to that promise he made back then by taking over to direct the ginger detective’s second big-screen adventure, in what would be his first narrative feature since 2014.
