The 2015 movie Kurt Russell predicted would be his next cult classic: “They’ll know after I’m dead!”
Few actors have starred in as many cult classics as Kurt Russell, and his nose for sniffing them out is so good that he’s even been able to predict the cult status of a movie that he had nothing to do with.
When he was working with Paul WS Anderson on 1998’s Soldier, an altogether terrible film that nonetheless made its leading man a shitload of money, the filmmaker was despondent that his previous picture, Event Horizon, had been hacked to pieces by the studio and flopped at the box office.
In response, Russell assured the filmmaker that his grisly sci-fi horror flick would eventually find an audience who appreciated it, and he was right. Three decades after its release, it might be the only decent thing that Anderson has ever made, with its cult credentials not even up for debate.
That’s what happens when you make so many of them yourself, though; you can see the signs. For Russell, he’s got Escape from New York, Breakdown, Big Trouble in Little China, Used Cars, Tombstone, Sky High, and many more in his locker, making him his generation’s undisputed king of cult cinema.
Obviously, it’s impossible to predict which titles will earn those stripes until they’ve been released, and it’s equally impossible to engineer one on purpose, since it lies entirely in the hands of the audience, and even then, it’s in the rules that those audiences won’t discover a film’s true worth until after it leaves the big screen and makes its way to home video.
Few are as knowledgeable on the subject as Russell, so when he was musing on which of his more recent offerings stood the best chance of joining the aforementioned flicks in his cult classic cabinet, one immediately came to mind. “I think The Hateful Eight‘s going to be one of those movies,” he suggested.
“The more you see it, the more you find,” he added, but is he right? In a word, no. It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, but it’s definitely one of Quentin Tarantino’s lesser works. The two-time Academy Award winner doesn’t really deal in cult films, at least not as a filmmaker, with Jackie Brown arguably the closest to ticking the requisite boxes, unless you’re a Death Proof defender, of course.
While it would have been nice for Russell’s most iconic starring roles to have been appreciated in their own time, he’s made peace with the fact that, based on nothing but history, he’s a lot more likely to have to wait for them to get their flowers. “Every entertainer has the Van Gogh DNA,” he added. “They’ll know after I’m dead!”
Fortunately, Russell is still very much alive, and that hasn’t stopped cinephiles from watching and rewatching his cultiest onscreen efforts. It’s a matter of opinion at the end of the day, but we’re a decade removed from The Hateful Eight‘s release, and nobody’s really willing to die on the hill that it’s a cult movie, which might be the way things remain forever.
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