The game-changing 2002 movie Ron Howard refused to direct: “I had a chance”
It can’t be denied that he’s made a few good movies, and even a couple of great ones, but Ron Howard has never helmed anything that could rightfully be called a cinematic game-changer.
The actor-turned-filmmaker has over two dozen features to his name, and while they’ve run the gamut of genres and showcased his versatility and willingness to try almost anything once, none of them have made a lasting, transformative, or indelible impact on the industry that ushered in a new era.
Could he make something like that, even if he wanted to? It’s debatable, with Howard being known more for his workmanlike efforts behind the camera and being a safe pair of hands than an auteur who’d rock the boat, break new ground, or put his name on anything that’s even a little bit daring or dangerous.
His highest-grossing release, The Da Vinci Code, was panned by critics, while his best movie, Apollo 13, couldn’t even get him on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Director’. He’s one of the most commercially successful directors of all time, sure, but after 50 years, he still doesn’t have a distinctive style, which is just the way he likes it, for some reason.
And yet, Howard could have changed the course of blockbuster history, and more than once. He was offered the reins on the first Harry Potter flick but turned it down, and that wasn’t the only massively influential big-budget release of the early 20th century that courted his services.
“I had a chance at Batman years ago, and Spider-Man,” he informed Bill Maher. “Not the Spider-Man that my daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, was in. Don’t we all love that one?” He’s being facetious, because not many people loved Sam Raimi’s threequel, but since the character’s first live-action feature was only released in 2002, he could have only realistically been in the running for that one.
Howard didn’t specify which Batman film he’d been offered, but he’s been around for so long that it could have been either Tim Burton’s 1989 original or Joel Schumacher’s 1995 nipples-and-neon extravaganza, but there hadn’t been a Spider-Man movie before ’02, which makes that one pretty cut-and-dried.
Stephen Norrington’s Blade and Bryan Singer’s X-Men may have restored the superhero genre to mainstream prominence, but it was Raimi who blew the door off its hinges, with his web-slinging adventure becoming one of the top-earning releases in cinema history. After that, every comic book with even a sliver of name recognition was swiftly gobbled up and spat out onto the silver screen.
By treating the narrative as a modern mythological tale, dedicating the first instalment to the origin story, treating the source material seriously, and hiring an auteur to inject it with their own sensibilities, for better or worse, Raimi’s Spider-Man set the template for Batman Begins, the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the ongoing superhero obsession, which may not have unfolded in quiet the same way with Howard’s complete absence of panache at the helm.
