“That’s it, there is no sequel”: the one movie Ron Howard would never make again
In an age where almost nothing is sacred and almost everything old will eventually become new again, it was inevitable that Ron Howard would be sucked into the vortex of repetition to blight Hollywood.
He was doing alright for a while, though, but when you’re a director who almost exclusively operated on mid-to-large-sized studio pictures, you can’t outrun it forever. It wasn’t until his 20th feature, Angels & Demons, that he crossed a sequel off his list, and since then, he’s grown fonder of returning to the well.
In addition to capping off his tedious Da Vinci Code trilogy, the two-time Academy Award winner redeveloped both Parenthood and Willow for the small screen, took over the tenth instalment in the Star Wars franchise when Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired, but at least he was smart enough to abandon The Dark Tower long before it started shooting.
His George Lucas-backed fantasy is a film that Howard has admitted he’d love to do over, mostly because he wasn’t comfortable with the industry’s most famous plaid enthusiast peering over his shoulder for the entire production, but the streaming series was cancelled before he got the chance to have a crack at it.
Most of Howard’s big-screen credits weren’t designed with sequels in mind, but there was one especially arduous production that he was glad to be over with. Unsurprisingly, it’s the one he called the toughest shoot of his career, and he breathed the biggest sigh of relief on the final day, safe in the knowledge that he’d never have to make anything like Backdraft again.
“We actually started filming before we ran all the tests, without knowing everything that we could do,” he confessed. “It was the most frightened I’ve ever been in a movie, because we came so close to having some serious accidents. One of the actual firefighters, who was also acting in the movie, had his eyebrows singed off, and when he went home, his wife flipped out.”
Missing eyebrows are hardly a life-or-death scenario, to be fair, but Howard did acknowledge that there was “another time some barrels blew up that weren’t supposed to, at the wrong time,” which sounds a lot more dangerous. “The day we said wrap, and we were done with the fire, I said, ‘That’s it, there is no sequel,'” he added, which technically wasn’t true.
Not many people will be aware that it even exists, but there is a Backdraft 2, which the original’s director had fuck all to do with. William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland were the only actors from the first flick to reprise their roles in 2018’s straight-to-video follow-up, with director Gonzalo López-Gallego indicating that he was no Ron Howard.
The Happy Days veteran has always looked back at his own work with a certain degree of rose-tinted fondness, but when it comes to Backdraft, he wouldn’t even consider putting himself through that again.
