John Grisham’s short-lived stint as cinema’s favourite source material
The movie industry has a regular habit of developing short-lived obsessions that spawn a slew of similar titles in rapid succession. Still, few proved to be so popular over such a short period of time before flaming out entirely than the John Grisham adaptation.
Some of the biggest, most notable, and talented performers in the business on either side of the camera lent their names to page-to-screen translations that could almost always be relied upon to win over critics or do big business at the box office, in many cases accomplishing both in the greatest of ease.
And yet, it was over almost as soon as it began, with the author’s signature brand of labyrinthine legal thrillers having been entirely absent from the big screen for over 20 years. Considering how many A-listers got in on the act at the height of the craze, it’s nothing if not curious as to why it died out entirely.
There were ten Grisham movies released between 1993 and 2004, but with sports drama Mickey and festive comedy Christmas with the Cranks occupying different genres, they technically don’t fit into the highly specific wheelhouse that Hollywood loved so much. Nonetheless, eight features hitting the same beats, all being derived from stories written by the same person, make it a craze in the truest sense, which makes it all the more fascinating that it was simply abandoned and never picked up again.
The ball got rolling with Sydney Pollack pitting Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman opposite each other in The Firm, which recouped its budget almost eight times over and landed two Academy Award nominations. Less than six months later, Alan J. Paluka directed Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief, another colossal box office success.
Susan Sarandon secured a ‘Best Actress’ nod at the Oscars for 1994’s The Client, with Joel Schumacher steering a third consecutive Grisham adaptation to certified hit status. The filmmaker would return to the well two years later with A Time to Kill, yet another box office bonanza that boasted a ludicrously stacked cast featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey, Ashley Judd, Chris Cooper, and many more.
The wheels started to come off in late 1996, though, with The Chamber becoming the first Grisham flick to bomb despite Hackman swinging by another one of the author’s adaptations. Francis Ford Coppola also tested the waters with The Rainmaker, which failed to translate its glowing appraisals from critics into tangible fiscal success.
Robert Altman’s star-studded The Gingerbread Man was an unmitigated financial disaster in 1998, leading to a five-year screen sabbatical for Grisham’s work. Hackman made his third appearance in Gary Fleder’s Runaway Jury, which again failed to turn a stellar response into monetary gain. Just like that, the fad was over.
Bringing Grisham’s books to cinemas yielded spectacular results right out of the gate, but several missteps ended up causing its ultimate downfall. Only one of them – The Chamber – was outright panned in all corners, but seven out of eight ain’t bad. Even though the array of talent was top-notch and the films themselves were largely stellar, at the very least across the board, not a single director or studio has been tickled by the notion to give Grisham a whirl since 2003, and who’s to say it won’t stay that way forever?
