The movie that broke Ron Howard’s heart: “I wanted more people to see it as intended”
Gone are the days of only having the chance to watch movies by actually going to the cinema, for you can stream whatever you fancy from the comfort of your own sofa, undisturbed by rowdy teenage audience members or the smell of stale popcorn lingering from beneath your seat.
That’s not to say that the cinema isn’t the superior way to watch a film, though, with its huge screen and surround sound offering an experience you cannot garner from putting a movie on your TV, even if you’ve got a pretty big one. Even worse if you’ve watched a film on a laptop, a tablet, or, lord forbid, a smartphone. Remember the days when people were watching movies on tiny iPods, merely because they could: that was criminal.
The thing is, though, the cinema isn’t always accessible, considering the amount of movies being churned out, who has the time to go and catch every new release? Therefore, we find ourselves streaming new releases once they’re out, or maybe waiting to watch them on a plane, forgoing the ‘correct’ way of consuming them, but whatever you do, don’t tell that to Ron Howard.
The director has made many blockbuster hits during his time as a filmmaker, the kind that are designed to smash the box office and be enjoyed on the biggest screen you can imagine. Think about Apollo 13 and Solo: A Star Wars Story: these are especially crafted to blow your mind, with their visuals being as important as the actual narrative.
Thus, he finds himself frustrated when people don’t consume his films as intended, which was especially the case when he released the 2013 sports drama Rush. “I was frustrated a little bit with Rush, because that was really a big-screen movie experience,” he told Coming Soon.
Exploring the competitive rivalry between Nika Lauda and James Hunt, two Formula One drivers who found themselves at odds with each other during the 1970s, the movie received positive reviews, but it hasn’t exactly endured as one of Howard’s most memorable. It totally missed out at the Academy Awards, and it actually grossed much less in the United States and Canada than it did anywhere else, making just $26.9million in the director’s native country.
“I kept on getting people coming up to me afterwards and saying, ‘I caught it on the airplane, and it was great!’ or ‘I saw it on TV. Wow, I had no idea!’ On the one hand, that’s a great compliment but a little heartbreaking for a director, because I knew it was a movie people liked and I wanted more people to see it as intended on the big screen,” he explained.
Howard isn’t the only one to feel strongly about how his films are consumed, wherein David Lynch once told Cahiers du cinema, “Before, we made a feature film for the big screen, with nice big speakers. We built the film as if it were a theatre itself. You could sit down and actually have this experience of stepping into a whole new world. Now that’s all in the bloody history books! It’s distressing. And a lot of things are seen on phones and tablets. I always say: people think they’ve seen a movie, but if they’ve watched it on a phone, they haven’t seen anything. It’s sad.”
Cinema and its consumption have certainly changed drastically over the years, maybe pointing to a need to get back to watching as much as we can on the big screen to revive its status from a dying art form.
