Ron Howard once predicted when he’d peak as a director: “You’re in store for a lot of shitty movies”
One of the worst things a filmmaker can do is try to predict their future, but Ron Howard didn’t give a shit when he boldly proclaimed that he was years away from reaching his peak. Obviously, the most important question remains: was he right?
In his defence, he’d been planning ahead since he was a kid. He was told during his days on The Andy Griffith Show that he had a mind for directing, which was impressive, since he wrapped up his run as Opie Taylor when he was 14 years old, even if he wasn’t bitten by the bug until later. By the time he started playing Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, Howard already viewed acting as a means to an end.
His dream was to step behind the camera, and he achieved that goal at the tender age of 23 when Roger Corman launched yet another directorial career after handing him the reins on 1977’s Grand Theft Auto. The actor-turned-filmmaker was in his early 20s, had two hit TV shows under his belt in different decades, notched dozens of credits alongside legends like John Wayne and Henry Fonda, and had a feature under his belt. It was a rapid rise to the top, but from his perspective, it was only the beginning.
In 1994, Howard was in a reflective mood when admitting to Entertainment Weekly that he was “blindsided” by the response to Far and Away. “We believed we had a $100 million movie,” he said. “We always scored high at test screenings. Then we got some bad reviews I wasn’t braced for. I think some critics thought, ‘Oh, this is Ron Howard thinking he’s David Lean’. Far and Away, because I’d wanted to make it for so long, felt like a conclusion to the first phase of my career.”
He was hardly a rookie, with the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman-starring period piece his ninth film as a director, but even then, he knew he was pretty milquetoast as an artist. “I don’t think I’ve pushed any boundaries yet as a director,” he confessed. “I may be a little braver in the future.” Spoiler: he wasn’t.
Nonetheless, Howard suggested that he’d “always believed that I’d do my best work from age 50 to 65.” He’d recently turned 40 when he said that, and since he’d been saying it for so long, his brother Clint had issued him a stern warning: “He looked at me and said, ‘That means you’re in store for a lot of shitty movies.”
Did Howard do his best work between 50 and 65, then? That’s the period between March 2004 and March 2014, and the simple answer is not really. Frost/Nixon earned him ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ nominations at the Academy Awards, but a run that also included Cinderella Man, two of the three Da Vinci movies, The Dilemma, which he’s since openly regretted, and Rush wasn’t his most fertile era.
Ironically, based on when he made his prediction, 40 to 50 was his finest stretch. Those years yielded his best movie, Apollo 13, and his four biggest earners. That, Ransom, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and A Beautiful Mind became the first and only films of Howard’s that he’d helmed by then to earn over $300 million at the box office, and the latter won him his two Oscars.
Throw in a trio of unsung gems in The Paper, EdTV, and The Missing, and it was easily his greatest stretch. Howard peaked earlier than he thought, and based on how things have been going for him over the last decade, it’s not inaccurate to say that he’s currently in the midst of his worst period as a director.
