The forgotten Ron Howard movie that proves audience testing is pointless
It has been a long, long time now since people thought of Ron Howard as Richie Cunningham on the long-running 1950s throwback TV sitcom Happy Days.
In fact it’s so long ago that a lot of people probably don’t even remember Happy Days at all, let alone the fact it’s where the phrase ‘Jumping the shark’ comes from. What they do know Ron Howard as, is one of the best directors in Hollywood, and he’s been that for a long time too.
Howard was a child actor on TV shows before he landed the role of the geeky Cunningham in 1974, and he played the part for the next six years or so before leaving in order to focus on his primary interest, directing films. As early as 1977, he starred in, wrote and directed Grand Theft Auto – a chaotic road-trip caper that critics didn’t like much but audiences did; it brought in over $15m at the box office against a budget of just over half a million and put Cunningham firmly in Hollywood’s spotlight.
Howard turned to his old mate The Fonz (or rather the actor Henry Winkler) to star in his next major movie, which was 1982’s Night Shift with Michael Keaton in his first major role. He then went on to direct Tom Hanks in Splash, the ‘old people emerge from eggs’ sci-fi Cocoon and the Val Kilmer fantasy Willow, which did big numbers on release.
Those successes brought him huge films in the 1990s, notably the real-life space drama Apollo 13, again starring Hanks alongside Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, which was a colossal hit worldwide. It also wowed the critics and earned nine Oscar nominations. After a switch of genre to direct Jim Carrey in The Grinch, Howard struck gold with the Russell Crowe drama A Beautiful Mind, which was hugely acclaimed and won him an Oscar for Best Director.
He had more big wins with the likes of The Da Vinci Code and the biography of F1 legend James Hunt, 2013’s Rush, before a rare miss came when he dipped his toes into Star Wars waters by directing 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
But recently he helmed a true life film that went very much under the radar, but really shouldn’t have done, packed as it is with superb performances, incredibly tense scenes and remarkable stuntwork.
Thirteen Lives was the 2022 retelling of the terrifying story of twelve young Thai football players and their team coach who had gone exploring caves only to get trapped miles inside due to sudden rainfall. Unable to reach them, the Thai government drafted in help from two professional divers from the UK who organised an insanely difficult extraction of all thirteen of them, safely, despite the death of one Thai diving expert.
The film wasn’t a huge commercial hit; perhaps it was too soon after the actual event and it suffered from an instant release via Amazon Prime video. But Howard recalled just how well the film did in early screenings, saying: “Thirteen Lives is the highest testing movie I’ve ever had. Even higher than Apollo 13, which was my previous high. I’ve had a lot of other movies that, you know, by testing standards were very successful. But there’s something about Thirteen Lives that is – and it’s the reason I wanted to do the movie.”
Featuring two brilliant central performances from Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell, the film contains a large amount of Thai dialogue, which Howard worried might alienate some viewers. But he decided to plough ahead to give as much of a sense of realism as possible and accentuate the selflessness of the men involved. He added: “It’s that idea of volunteers who don’t have even to be there risking their bodies, risking their psyches, sometimes their careers just simply to try to do the right thing. Crossing these cultural, ideological barriers and just getting things done. Ignoring politics and just doing it.”
Both the divers from the UK were awarded some of the highest gallantry honours achievable by civilians and the movie itself picked up Best Actor nominations for Farrell. Howard is currently working on a fantasy adventure movie called The Shrinking of Treehorn and another space movie, this time an adaptation of the 2015 novel Seveneves.
