The boycotted 2013 movie that caused a “real dilemma” for Harrison Ford: “Should I not have made the film?”
Despite spending almost 50 years as a mainstream movie star and household name, Harrison Ford has impressively managed to avoid being caught up in any career-threatening controversies.
The longer someone stays at the top, the more likely it is that they’ll be brought crashing back down to earth one day: just ask Mel Gibson, Will Smith, Robert Downey Jr, or Wesley Snipes. Ford, though, has managed to remain at the summit since Star Wars was released, but it hasn’t been entirely without incident.
His on-set affair with Carrie Fisher was kept under wraps for four decades, he constantly butted heads with Brad Pitt on The Devil’s Own, the tension was palpable between the veteran and young upstart Josh Hartnett on Hollywood Homicide, and barely a day passed on Blade Runner without tempers reaching boiling point.
All minor in the grand scheme of things, with Ford becoming more synonymous with injuring himself during production and coming perilously close to causing aviation disasters than finding his name becoming mud in Hollywood circles. However, he found himself caught between a rock and a hard place when he agreed to star in the 2013 adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel, Ender’s Game.
During the period when virtually every novel geared towards a young adult audience that sold a decent amount of copies was snapped up and brought to the screen, it was inevitable that Ender’s Game would happen eventually. The downside was that its author was a massive bigot and a homophobe.
Card had vocally and publicly backed laws against homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and wrote lengthy op-eds on why “those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation” should be punished, which hardly endeared the big-budget movie based on his work to LGBTQ+ audiences or those who supported the community.
Several gay rights groups boycotted Ender’s Game in protest and urged others to do so, producer Roberto Orci claimed he was unaware of the author’s stance on homosexuality when he acquired the rights, pleading for audiences to judge the picture as a standalone work of cinema and “not the personal beliefs of the original author,” while Ford admitted that he had a bit of an existential crisis.
“It has been a real dilemma for me,” he reflected. “I love the book Ender’s Game, it’s all about tolerance and compassion, and understanding the other. Should I not have made the film because of his views? I wrestled with that, and you know what? I thought, ‘If I don’t put these ideas out on screen, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.'”
In the end, it didn’t really matter. Even with a stacked cast that featured Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, and Ben Kingsley alongside Ford, Ender’s Game flopped at the box office and lost a fortune for the studio, and it would have flopped either way, with or without the boycotts, removing any potential franchise based on the book series from the equation in an instant.
