Jack Nicholson’s only two movies that didn’t turn a profit: “No one else has that record”
The way Hollywood has always worked is that the best actors don’t necessarily make the most money at the box office, and the biggest stars rarely make the best movies. However, Jack Nicholson spent almost his entire mainstream career with one foot planted firmly in each world.
Daniel Day-Lewis has three Academy Awards, but his entire filmography combined has earned less in ticket sales than Despicable Me 4. On the other side of the coin, Chris Hemsworth has amassed over $12 billion in career box office without giving a single performance that lingers in the memory.
That’s an extreme example to illustrate the gulf between actors and movie stars, but Nicholson perfected the art of delivering top-tier performances and hoovering up awards season recognition while still guaranteeing that audiences would turn up in their droves to check out his latest picture.
It takes a very confident, some might even say arrogant, performer to anoint themselves as the single most successful actor in cinema history, but Nicholson did it. Not only that, but he once pulled out the receipts to underline that even the movies initially dismissed as flops eventually turn a profit.
“About a month ago, I got my first overage check on Goin’ South,” he shared in an interview. “Which took my record from 47 and three to 48 and two. Nobody else has that record. With a couple of exceptions, all the movies I’ve made since Easy Rider have gone into net profit.”
The second of Nicholson’s three directorial efforts was a commercial disappointment plagued by tales of discontent between the actor/director and co-star John Belushi, but it still wound up in the black. Sure, it took a while, and the margins probably weren’t enough to make a rich man even richer, but the three-time Oscar winner still earned money on the backend when all was said and done.
As for the only two blemishes on his near-spotless track record? Mike Nichols’ 1975 comedy The Fortune and Tony Richardson’s 1982 noir thriller The Border were singled out as “the only two movies I haven’t received bonus premiums on,” which is an incredible run, considering Nicholson was one of Hollywood’s most famous names and in-demand leading men from the late 1960s until the early 2010s when he stepped away from the industry.
The “super-structural Jack Nicholson account,” as he called it, ensured that he was always contractually obliged to receive a cut once any film he appeared in became profitable, whether it was during its theatrical run or through television syndication or home video sales. Two out of 50 is a hell of a return, so maybe he wasn’t being cocky at all when he called himself the undisputed king of cinematic success.
