“I don’t think the audience cares”: the 2013 movie that left Billy Bob Thornton staring irrelevance in the face
At first glance, you might feel yourself disagreeing with Billy Bob Thornton, since recent events have shown that audiences do still care about him, or at the very least, the things he’s making.
After all, almost 10 million people watched the second season premiere of Landman in the first 48 hours it was available to stream, and that number increased to almost 15 million by the time the tenth and final instalment of the show’s sophomore run dropped in January 2026.
While some of that can be put down to the Taylor Sheridan phenomenon, with virtually every one of the prolific creator, writer, and executive producer’s on-demand originals finding a huge audience, Thornton’s Golden Globe-nominated performance as Tommy Norris is a major reason behind its popularity.
Admittedly, things haven’t been as rosy on the feature-length front, seeing as nobody gave a shit about Netflix’s The Gray Man, which has been his highest-profile movie role since 2018. Does he care? Probably not, with the luxury of television giving him the time to focus more attention on his musical career.
At this stage, though, it can become easy to forget that Thornton manufactured his own breakthrough, and he did it as a filmmaker. He was a bit-part player, a background performer, and a character actor for his first decade in Hollywood, until he scripted, directed, and played the leading role in 1996’s Sling Blade, which won him an Academy Award for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ and a ‘Best Actor’ nomination.
It looked like he had a bright future behind the camera, but it wasn’t to be. All the Pretty Horses was supposed to be his magnum opus, and Matt Damon is adamant that’s exactly what it would be until Harvey Weinstein got his grubby hands all over it, knocking Thornton’s auteurial confidence for six.
With his passion project butchered, he wouldn’t direct again for another 13 years. When he did, Jayne Mansfield’s Car was barely given a theatrical release to speak of, received a response from critics that could generously be described as tepid at best, and failed to even scrape $80,000 at the box office.
His directorial career couldn’t have gotten off to a much better start, but it was all downhill from there. “I don’t think the audience cares about what I have to say anymore,” Thornton sighed. “I think they still care as an actor, but I think I’m obsolete as a writer and director. I think I would probably come across as the old guy saying The Beatles are better than the music now.”
Funny you should mention that, since Thornton, who’s in his 70s now, literally is the old guy saying The Beatles are better than the music now, so he’s nothing if not honest about it. The failure of Jayne Mansfield’s Car left him staring filmmaking irrelevancy in the face, and since 2013, the only thing he’s helmed has been a solitary episode of his TV series, Goliath, so he might well be done as a director.
