The one movie John Travolta will never regret making, even though he should: “Are you kidding?”
Most actors don’t get a second chance at stardom, but John Travolta did, and what did he do with that rare opportunity? He blew it up all over again and soon discovered that there wouldn’t be a third.
It’s hard for anyone to spend uninterrupted decades as a major star, so there’s no shame in Travolta slipping down the ladder. Tom Cruise has been perched on the summit of the A-list for 40 years, but he’s an anomaly, and even at that, he had to weather a mid-2000s meltdown and emerge on the other side.
After becoming one of the youngest Academy Award-nominated actors in history and burning himself into the cultural zeitgeist with Saturday Night Fever, there was no way that Travolta could maintain that momentum forever. To the surprise of nobody, he didn’t, and by the early 1990s, he was an afterthought.
All if took was one tailor-made role from a writer and director who’d literally built a shrine to the man to turn the tides, with Pulp Fiction bringing him back from the brink. Suddenly, he was an in-demand leading man again, and that renewed popularity was reflected in a string of stellar box office receipts.
Seven of Travolta’s next 12 starring roles earned upwards of $100 million in cinemas, and he was back on top, proving that Vincent Vega wasn’t a flash in the pan. You couldn’t make it up, but the unlucky 13th theatrically released feature of the post-Pulp Fiction years was, in fact, Battlefield Earth, which sent him crashing back down to earth.
It’s not just that it was one of the worst movies ever made, which it was. It was that Travolta genuinely believed his big-budget love letter to Scientology was going to be his Star Wars, only to find out after it flopped at the box office, won seven Razzies, and killed a studio that not everyone was as enthusiastic about seeing L Ron Hubbard’s work adapted for the silver screen as he was.
He never truly recovered from the Battlefield Earth debacle, and these days, he’s more likely to be found slumming it on the straight-to-video circuit in thrillers that even Nicolas Cage would baulk at, his days as a valuable commodity having been over for a long time. And yet, when asked if he regretted it, he couldn’t believe someone would dare ask him such a stupid question.
“No way, are you kidding?” he asked The Daily Beast. “Why would I ever regret that? I had the power to do whatever I wanted, and I chose to do a book that I thought was worthy of making into a movie. It’s a beautiful film. It’s a good movie.” He’s wrong on both counts, obviously, and in addition to being its one of its few defenders, he said he’d do it all over again.
“I have no regrets at all,” he doubled down. “And if we had to do it all over again, I would still do it. It was a moment where I could say, ‘I had all the power in the world and could do whatever I wanted’. Not a lot of people get that opportunity, and I did what I wanted to do.” That’s all well and good, and some might even say admirable, but what he also did was drop a nuclear bomb on his own career, so there’s that.
