“I was rooting against my own movie”: the only time Ron Howard prayed to the heavens for a flop
No actor or filmmaker should be actively hoping for their latest movie to bomb at the box office, especially one with a reputation as wholesome as Ron Howard. And yet, he was once desperate for failure, marking the first and only time he wished such a fate upon his own work.
Flops are unavoidable for anyone who has even a short career in the industry, never mind somebody with seven decades of experience. Howard has suffered a few, and an alarming number of them have come in the last decade, with the two-time Academy Award winner more desperate for a hit than he’s ever been.
He’s still one of the most commercially successful directors in cinema history, and even if you exclude Hillbilly Elegy and Thirteen Lives because they were streaming exclusives, you’d have to go all the way back to 2009’s Angels & Demons to find the last Howard-helmed flick that could be called an unqualified hit. Even at that, it earned almost $300 million less than its predecessor, The Da Vinci Code.
The former Happy Days star is too much of a nice guy to cross his fingers and pray to the heavens that one of his directorial efforts sinks without a trace in cinemas, but that wasn’t the case when he was a full-time actor. He didn’t have as much skin in the game, and as a result, there was one film he’d rather as few people saw as possible.
In what would be his final feature-length credit before George Lucas’ American Graffiti, Howard took third billing behind Steve Forrest and Vera Miles in 1970’s The Wild Country, which also starred his older brother, Clint, as his onscreen sibling. He was only 16 when he made it, but he’d have still preferred it wasn’t a success, and an upcoming milestone was the reason why.
“By the time of The Wild Country‘s release late in 1970, I was a mere three months from turning 17, and frankly, I was embarrassed to be in a corny Disney movie,” he wrote in his memoir, The Boys. “It felt like an extension of my Opie image, which I had finally managed to shake off.”
A family-friendly western, the movie was a formulaic blend of adventure tropes, coming-of-age stories, and family drama, following the Tanner clan as they upped sticks from Pittsburgh to Wyoming to fix up the dilapidated ranch that they would now be calling home. It was entirely forgettable, which was just the way Howard wanted it.
“The film stiffed at the box office,” he shared. “I was relieved. That meant it was only around in theatres and drive-ins for about two weeks before it disappeared. That’s a harsh thing for me to acknowledge, that I was rooting against my own movie. But such was the push/pull of adolescence, in which my gratitude for all that Opie had given me existed in tension with my desire to be a man. Because I was a man, damn it.”
No offence, Ron, but you weren’t; you were a 16-year-old kid. The Wild Country did fail, at least, and he was pleased that it did, but it’s perfectly on-brand for Howard to admit that he felt bad about it.
