The two movies Ron Howard will always regret not making: “I could never get the money together”
The most difficult movie Ron Howard will ever have to make was his first, with the actor and aspiring filmmaker having to jump through hoops before he was granted the opportunity to take the reins on his feature debut.
By the 1970s, he was already an industry veteran with decades of credits under his belt across film and television, including George Lucas’ ‘Best Picture’ nominee, American Graffiti. Howard was in a position most young actors would kill for, but he couldn’t have been less enthusiastic about the future.
The second-generation star always wanted to be a director and saw acting as a means to an end. However, it was difficult to convince anyone that he could helm a film until Roger Corman issued an ultimatum that toppled the first domino when 1977’s Grand Theft Auto was released.
Since then, Howard has barely acted at all, instead focusing his energies on becoming one of the highest-grossing directors of all time, not to mention a two-time Academy Award winner. He’s tackled almost every genre cinema has to offer, and he’s more than proven himself as being one of Hollywood’s most versatile and adaptable figures, which still wasn’t enough to will two passion projects into existence.
He may not be an auteur by its strictest definition, and there’s nothing about Howard’s filmography that’s singled him out as a visual stylist, narrative boundary pusher, or innovative, creative mind, but he’s got the experience, name value and bankability to make just about whatever he wants, with two notable exceptions.
As often tends to be the case in Tinseltown, funding was the breaking point. Howard has made plenty of expensive pictures throughout his career, but for whatever reason, taking to the open water was always a hurdle he couldn’t clear. That said, when he did mount an aquatic epic with 2015’s In the Heart of the Sea, the fact that it bombed may indicate that he was better off on dry land.
“I went a long way down the road, prepping two water movies over the years,” he mused to Entertainment Weekly. “One was called Rainbow Warrior, and it was about a Greenpeace event that had occurred in the ’80s, and I never could get the money together to make that movie.”
Even though it’s been the subject of at least a dozen adaptations on screens big and small, bringing a classic Jack London novel to life was another insurmountable obstacle. “I prepped and planned and devoted a lot of time and energy into trying to make The Sea-Wolf,” he admitted.
The story of a literary critic who ends up locked in a psychological battle with the foreboding captain who rescues him at sea following an accident was another one ripped out of his hands for financial reasons. Howard acknowledged that not only was it “cost-prohibitive,” but he lacked confidence in his own ability to do it justice, saying that he “didn’t feel we were going to be able to live up to the promise of that story.”
Basically, Howard and water aren’t the most fruitful combination. He wanted to make two watery flicks that never came to pass, and the one he did get around to making was a commercial disaster.
