The only role Michael Douglas regrets turning down: “More profitable for me than any picture”
There are many different ways to deal with the stress and post-Christmas lull, but the most fun way is to approach it like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
OK, so before anyone gets too hasty, I am not suggesting anyone in a traffic jam simply leaves their car and just walks off to embark on a campaign of carnage like Douglas does in the much forgotten about but absolutely brilliant 1993 movie, but there is an element of ‘fuck it what does any of it matter’ that it’s worth embracing to get through this part of the year. That and remembering that the days get lighter and lighter until the end of June.
To give Douglas his credit, he has several much better excuses for stepping away from an anxiety-raising Los Angeles commute in order to shoot and baseball bat his way through an action-packed day, and there is some definite catharsis to Joel Schumacher’s movie to be had watching someone completely and psychotically lose the plot while you’ve got your feet up waiting for a Jamie Oliver lasagne in the oven.
It was a pretty brave part for Douglas to take on; although he had huge success as the anti-hero Gordon Gekko in Wall Street this was on a different level completely, there was considerable controversy about the film’s nihilistic violence and the commentary about the fallacy of the American dream and it came just a year after the catastrophic LA riots that saw scores killed, widespread looting and intense racial tensions.
Douglas was evidently in the midst of his own ‘who cares let’s see what happens’ phase, as the year before Falling Down, he’d also taken a big gamble on Basic Instinct, the erotic thriller that got the religious right in the US all hot under the collar thanks to Sharon Stone’s leg crossing, and yet that had proved to be an enormous hit.
Ironically, the one role that Douglas passed up on came many years later and would have been a far safer bet than those he took on in the ‘90s. Speaking about how he was offered a part in the global Disney smash Frozen back in 2013, Douglas said it was: “One animation picture, just a voiceover, that would have been more profitable for me than any picture I’d ever done.”
While nobody could have guessed just how popular Frozen would become on release, had Douglas taken the role and negotiated even a small percentage of revenue, he would indeed have made a fair bit; Frozen would go on to bring in a box office total of almost $1.3billion, with a sequel following six years later that made even more.
Now 81, Douglas has, however, managed to spend the last decade getting himself into some pretty sizable franchises, most notably the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thanks to the Ant-Man movies alongside Paul Rudd, of which there were three, plus an appearance in Avengers: Endgame.
Now he has pretty much retired, although he is reportedly involved with a project opposite Christoph Waltz about the Cold War called Reagan & Gorbachev.
