The one movie Ron Howard wishes he’d never made: “I wouldn’t have pursued the project”
Regrets are awfully hard to come by for Ron Howard, who’s spent almost his entire life in the public eye, evolving from a cherubic child star into a popular actor, before stepping behind the camera and establishing himself as one of the industry’s most successful and respected veterans.
There’s no shortage of names who’ve spent half as much time in Hollywood and harbour twice as many regrets, but the Happy Days star and two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker continues to uphold his reputation as one of the nicest guys in the business, who barely has a bad word to say about anything.
That doesn’t mean he puts on his finest rose-tinted glasses when taking a trip down memory lane, though, with The Dilemma a notable example of a Howard-helmed film that didn’t get the seal of approval from its director with the benefit of hindsight, after he called it “tone-deaf” in execution.
He dodged a bullet by dropping out of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, but he still called it a mistake after he produced a woeful box office bust that turned a sprawling fantasy into a 92-minute turd. A couple of unmade pictures linger in his mind as the ones that got away, and Jack Nicholson was the on-camera white whale he could never land, but that’s almost it.
Almost, because Hillbilly Elegy exists. It’s widely regarded as the nadir of Howard’s directorial output because that’s exactly what it is, and now he has to spend his spare time being bombarded by questions about the biopic’s subject, JD Vance, who’ll never have another movie made about his life unless it’s produced by The Daily Wire.
The Netflix dud was released in November 2020, and a little over six months later, the guy who was played by Gabriel Basso and shared scenes with a preposterous Glenn Close in an Oscar and Razzie-nominated performance announced, and subsequently won, a tilt at the United States Senate.
“The journalists saw something coming I didn’t; JD running for Senate,” he informed The Financial Times. “If I’d realised that too, I wouldn’t have pursued the project. Because it was unavoidably going to be politicised. I did ask JD about running for office, and he didn’t seem interested.”
It would be incredibly unlike him, but Vance may have been telling Howard a half-truth, if not full-blown misinformation. After all, he’d first gone public with his consideration of seeking political office in early 2018, almost a year before the director’s Imagine Entertainment had scooped up the rights to his memoir, and well before the cameras started rolling in June 2019.
Even if it wasn’t about someone who’d become such a divisive presence in the cultural landscape, most viewers would have preferred if Howard hadn’t made Hillbilly Elegy because it’s crap. Unfortunately, he can’t see the future and can’t change the past, so unless he makes something worse, it’ll continue to linger as his worst-ever offering.
