The “high risk” Clint Eastwood movie that America hated: “A lot of people are disappointed”
It’s not even unpatriotic; it’s borderline blasphemous to suggest that America would hate a Clint Eastwood movie. And yet, it happened, and the legendary actor and director knows exactly why.
As one of the nation’s most iconic stars, he’s bled red, white, and blue on the big screen for over 60 years. He’ll never be regarded as the greatest performer the United States have ever produced, but in terms of stardom, success, and longevity, he’s unquestionably one of Hollywood’s all-time greats.
Even the biggest names in the business suffer their fair share of flops, and Eastwood has had a few. However, what stung local audiences so badly was that they’d been led to believe they were getting one kind of film, only to end up with something completely different. Naturally, they did what any pissed off customers would do and voted with their wallets, casting the film adrift at the box office.
In theory, 1993’s A Perfect World should have been a smash hit. Eastwood was hotter than he’d been in a long time after the back-to-back victories of Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire. One of them was an awards season favourite and his magnum opus, while the other was a high-octane blockbuster.
Meanwhile, Kevin Costner was arguably the single biggest star in town, with his last four credits comprised of Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard. Pairing two popular figures of different generations together for the first time while both were at the peak of their powers was a licence to print money, until the crime drama tanked on home soil.
The marketing had led viewers to believe that they were getting a hard-boiled thriller that pitted Eastwood and Costner against each other in a game of cat and mouse. Instead, they barely shared any scenes, with the crux of the narrative following the latter’s escaped convict as he kidnaps a child and goes on the run, bonding with his young victim while the former’s Texas Ranger sets out to track them down.
“I always felt this movie was high risk,” Eastwood informed The New York Times. “I just liked the story. Sure, a lot of people are disappointed. But if you don’t grow up, you just get in a rut. You can make sequels and imitations and make some dough. But you’ve got to make a wide variety of things so somebody people look back and say, ‘Hey, he tried, he did this, he took some risks.'”
“In this film, the audience was probably expecting two guys who’d be at each other, or two pals on a wild adventure,” the four-time Academy Award winner surmised. “It wasn’t that kind of film.” He was right, not that the trailers filled everybody in on that fact, and casting the clean-cut and all-American Costner as a gun-toting child abductor did a stellar job of alienating his core audience, too.
In the end, despite a strong response from critics, A Perfect World tanked in the States after barely recouping its $30 million budget. Overseas crowds proved to be much more amenable, though, with the movie raking in over $100 million internationally to ensure that it didn’t become a worldwide bomb.
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