The movie Michael Caine was told would bomb before it bombed: “You can’t make this stuff up”
Bombs are an unfortunate part of the industry, and there’s barely an actor or filmmaker in the business who hasn’t been a part of at least one. That said, it must have stung more for Michael Caine when he was told his movie was destined to flop at the box office, long before it had the chance to do just that.
He’s no stranger to a commercial dud or two, or three, or four, or five, but that comes with the territory when you’ve literally made hundreds of them. Not every picture gets to be a winner, and despite lending his name to some right old shite over the decades, Caine has weathered every single cinematic storm.
That’s what happens when you’re one of the best in the business, and his star shined so bright for so long that nobody really cares if Jaws: The Revenge, The Swarm, or The Last Witch Hunter sank on the big screen, because he’s Michael bloody Caine, and that next great movie or acclaimed performance was always lurking around the corner to save him from the scrapheap.
The two-time Academy Award winner always saw himself as a working actor, which is why he never showed much interest in founding a production company and developing his own projects from the ground up. He was deeply invested in a lot of them, but even that was far from a guarantee of success, with The Quiet American a prime example of a film that came perilously close to ending up in limbo.
The first time he was ever credited in a behind-the-scenes capacity was in 1987, when he executive-produced the spy thriller, The Fourth Protocol. Even though Frederick Forsyth’s eponymous novel had sold millions of copies, Caine spent over a year and a half trying to cobble together the money to make it.
“I was a failure as an executive producer,” he admitted to The Washington Post. “I couldn’t get any money out of LA.” One of the main reasons the movie struggled to find American backers was that potential investors thought the story of Caine’s British operative stumbling upon a plot orchestrated by Pierce Brosnan’s KGB agent was too anti-Soviet, and they didn’t want to take the socio-political risk.
That said, there was another, much stranger, reason given to him by one of the money men. “Goldie Hawn had just made a film called Protocol, and it bombed,” he explained. “I guess they thought a film called The Fourth Protocol would lose four times as much money. You can’t make up stuff like this.”
Hawn’s 1984 film may have cost twice as much to make as Caine’s The Fourth Protocol, but it also earned twice as much money at the box office. If that constituted a bomb, then his star vehicle, which had absolutely no similarities whatsoever beyond sharing a single word in their respective titles, didn’t stand a chance.
In what’s probably not a coincidence, that would be the last time he wore his producorial hat for five years. When he did, 1992’s Blue Ice barely got a theatrical release on either side of the Atlantic, and it would be the last time Caine produced anything that he also appeared in as an actor.
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