The Kurt Russell movie “purposely sabotaged” by the studio: “I was actually told”
While studio interference has definitely saved a few movies, a lot more have been ruined. Usually, it’s the filmmakers who feel the suits breathing down their necks, but Kurt Russell knew he was acting in a losing battle when he was told that his paymasters were actively trying to sabotage the film he was making.
It can’t be a nice position to be in on either side of the camera, having to deal with your paymasters looming ominously in the background, suggesting changes that need to be made or scenes that need to be cut. Sometimes, directors aren’t even consulted; once they’ve handed off to the post-production team, the boardroom brings out the scissors and hacks their creative vision to pieces.
There are very few names in Hollywood who can be deemed completely immune from studio interference, and Russell isn’t one of them. Neither is his long-time friend and most famous collaborator, John Carpenter, who’s been through the wars several times over in dealing with over-eager executives.
You’d have thought that after making Elvis, Escape from New York, and The Thing together, all of which were widely acclaimed, if not hugely lucrative at the time of their initial release, anyone who brought in the B-tier genre flick’s ultimate dream team for another project would know exactly what they were getting.
Unfortunately, when 20th Century Fox began perusing the dailies from Big Trouble in Little China, not only did they have no idea what they were getting, they had no clue what it was supposed to be. Admittedly, a modern-day, western-inspired and martial arts-influenced combination of action, comedy, and fantasy wasn’t the easiest thing to describe, but maybe the studio should have asked.
After comprehensively failing to grasp whatever it was that Carpenter and Russell were doing, Fox opted to wash its hands of the movie almost entirely. It was barely given a marketing budget to speak of, which played a huge role in the picture failing to recoup its production budget at the box office, and matters weren’t helped by James Cameron’s Aliens arriving on the scene two weeks after its release.
“People loved it, but at the same time, the studio had no idea how to promote that,” Russell reflected to Film Ink. “I was actually told by some people in the publicity department that it was purposely sabotaged. Any number of things can be a reason that a movie doesn’t catch on at the time, but it does later on.”
As he alluded to, Russell, Carpenter, and Big Trouble in Little China got the last laugh in the end. Yes, it flopped in cinemas and was swept under the rug by Fox as quickly as possible, but for the last 30 years, the bonkers, genre-bending caper has continued to win over new converts, becoming one of the defining cult classics of the 1980s.
It would have been better for all parties had the film succeeded at the first time of asking, but since the studio clearly didn’t give a shit if it sank or swam, an enduring legacy is a decent compromise.
