Josh Brolin explains why he hated ‘Jonah Hex’
Josh Brolin has taken on a number of extraordinary roles in cinema and delivered spellbinding performances along the way. Amongst them are his features in No Country for Old Men, Sicario and perhaps the best of the lot: his excellent showing as Lieutenant Christian F. ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.
Yet despite Brolin’s brilliance in a number of gems, one of his films that undoubtedly flopped was Jonah Hex, a feature in which he played the titular 19th Century bounty hunter Marvel superhero. Jimmy Hayward directed the film in his directorial debut, having had it written for him by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
The fact that Neveldine and Taylor departed the film a few months before production began left the movie in a constant state of disarray. The script was rewritten several times, the budget ran way over, and several scenes had to be reshot. In the end, Jonah Hex grossed just $11 million from a whopping $80 million total cost.
Brolin himself once noted the complete disaster that made the film a disaster. As reported by Collider, he said: “Oh, Jonah Hex, hated it. Hated it. The experience of making it – that would have been a better movie based on what we did. As opposed to what ended up happening to it, which is going back and reshooting 66 pages in 12 days.”
It’s an interesting turn of events when an actor claims that a film based on shooting a particular film rather than the film itself would be more enjoyable. However, Brolin also noted the reasons that he had joined the project in the first place and the fact that a big budget may have ultimately been Jonah Hex’s downfall.
“Listen, I understand it’s financiers, you’re trying to save their money, and it becomes a financial thing,” he said. “But there’s this thing called revenge trading. And I’m disciplined enough to know you never do it. But with Jonah Hex, if I had $5 million… [that’s] always how I saw that movie.”
Evidently, Brolin believes that a budget of just $5 million could have produced a far superior film. He added: “I remember when I was talking to Warner Bros. about doing that movie, High Plains Drifter is what I put on the TV. I said, ‘That’s what I wanna do.’ I would do that movie still. If I ever had the balls to spend $5 million, which I don’t, I would do that movie because that’s the version of that movie that would have been successful, for sure. And it didn’t need to cost anything more than $8-$10 million.”
