When Kurt Russell saw the future of cinema and nobody listened: “It was like talking to a wall”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kurt Russell has never shown much interest in being anything other than an actor, which hasn’t stopped him from enjoying a legendary career.
Whereas plenty of on-camera performers expand their horizons and branch out into writing, producing, and directing, it’s never something that’s interested Russell. He’s amassed over 100 credits across film and television, and he’s only been credited in more than one capacity on two of them.
The first was John Carpenter’s Escape from LA, with Russell not only reprising the iconic role of Snake Plissken a decade and a half after the original but also serving as a producer and co-writer of the screenplay. The second came almost 25 years later when he was listed as a producer on the Netflix sequel The Christmas Chronicles 2.
Clearly, Russell has always preferred staying in his lane, even if he did predict the future of cinema. These days, if there’s one thing a studio loves more than a money-spinning franchise, it’s an entire shared universe. Comic book conglomerates Marvel and DC have one, Godzilla and King Kong share another, and Universal made an embarrassing attempt to build one of its own with Tom Cruise at the forefront.
Nostalgia has become increasingly important in Hollywood, with the release schedule awash with legacy sequels and movies that only exist to trade in on an actor or ensemble cast’s prior reputation. Russell suggested that there was money to be made by combining the best of both worlds, only to discover that he was better off screaming into the void.
“Years ago I did think, and nobody would listen to me, I thought it would be great to take a bunch of the characters that guys like Bruce Willis, Stallone, and Schwarzenegger – they all had one best character in the action-ary world – that I thought it would be fun to put those guys together,” Russell told Kevin McCarthy. “But pitching it was like talking to a wall. It was ahead of its time, I guess.”
Hypothetically speaking, Russell envisioned a blockbuster that could have potentially seen his Plissken, Willis’ John McClane, Stallone’s Rambo, and Schwarzenegger’s Dutch (for talking’s sake, let’s opt for his Predator character because the Terminator wouldn’t make a lot of sense in this context) team up to battle against a common enemy in a gun-toting showdown for the ages.
Not only did he predict the crossover appeal of things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which he eventually joined when he signed up for James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, but his concept of uniting cinema’s marquee action stars predated The Expendables, which ironically teamed up Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis in the first two instalments.
Maybe that’s why Russell wasn’t interested in becoming the latest high-profile addition to the roster: At the time, he said “it’s not a beat I get, it’s like looking backwards to me,” but maybe the real reason he turned his nose up at The Expendables was because it had stolen his idea.
