The martial arts movie that made Clint Eastwood hate Coca-Cola: “Forevermore banned from his sight”
He’s got 40 features and four Academy Awards under his belt as a filmmaker, but nobody would go so far as to call Clint Eastwood one of the more versatile or dynamic directors Hollywood has at its disposal.
That’s not intended as a slight when the evidence is stacked sky-high that he’s a massively accomplished and eminently successful filmmaker, with his signature style of economic efficiency and no-nonsense approach to shooting also making him a pair of cinema’s most reliable hands.
Eastwood specialises in character-based stories, whether they be thrillers, dramas, biopics, period pieces, war stories, or the occasional actioner. One thing that’s never been in his wheelhouse is genre fare, and on the rare occasions he sought to stretch himself, the end result left a lot to be desired.
He dabbled in the supernatural with Hereafter, which was one of the worst films he’s ever helmed. Eastwood adopted experimentalism by hiring real-life subjects to play themselves in The 15:17 to Paris, which was even worse. The prospect of him making a kid-friendly family film is admittedly a strange one, but it was under consideration.
In fact, Eastwood was so butthurt at not being able to indulge his nepotistic side that he declared a multinational corporation as one of his sworn nemeses. It was a box office smash hit, an Oscar-nominated movie, and a cultural phenomenon which launched a franchise that’s still going strong today, but can anyone really imagine the ‘Man with No Name’ and Dirty Harry directing The Karate Kid?
Eastwood certainly could, and he wanted to cast his son Kyle in the lead role of Daniel LaRusso. The grizzled face of the revisionist western was in talks to steer the production, but once it was decided that Ralph Macchio would headline the cast at the expense of his boy, he was out.
“Clint had agreed to direct Karate Kid for Columbia only if Kyle played the lead, but they had refused,” Eastwood’s longtime partner Sondra Locke wrote in her autobiography. “Clint forevermore banned Coca-Cola from his sight.” At first glance, the overriding sentiment is ‘What does Coke have to do with it?’, but they were integral to the movie and the studio.
Columbia Pictures was acquired by The Coca-Cola Company in 1982 and remained under the conglomerate’s ownership until the end of the decade when it was purchased by Sony and made a subsidiary. The studio had refused to cast Eastwood’s son as the titular karate kid, and because that was a decision technically approved and potentially made by Coca-Cola’s top brass, they’d become instant enemies.
Presumably, any and all signs of Coca-Cola were swiftly banished from Eastwood’s personal and professional lives, and it remains a mystery as to whether or not that self-imposed ban has ever been lifted after the fizzy drinks giant pissed off one of the most famous faces in cinema.
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