The failed movie Michael Douglas compared to a “punch in the gut”
Success is never guaranteed, even for actors as prominent as Michael Douglas, where it only takes a few misfires to have them questioning the shape of their entire careers.
One of the original ‘nepo babies’ but also a multigenerational movie star, Douglas proved to be a talent in his own right. Being the son of the legendary Spartacus actor Kirk Douglas certainly gave him more than a few advantages, wherein he spent his early days strictly as a producer; however, in the late 1970s and ‘80s, he rose to become a unique, fearless actor who would often make films that were both prestigious and popular.
Any star who reaches the heights that Douglas did will inevitably be faced with a downward spiral, as the industry tends to have a short memory, and no amount of goodwill that he had developed among viewers prevented The In-Laws and It Runs in the Family from being financial disasters.
The failures weren’t entirely shocking based on the negative reviews, but few things are more upsetting for a star when they appear in something that they’re proud of that people don’t end up seeing. In Douglas’ case, the film was Wonder Boys, a campus drama in which he plays a middle-aged professor who discovers a young prodigy in Tobey Maguire, the underperformance of which he said hurt his confidence moving forward.
“It was like a punch in the gut and hurt my confidence in terms of understanding what was going on,” he claimed, “My father’s favourite movie is Lonely are the Brave, which nobody saw when it came out and nobody’s seen since. You always like to believe that, 20 years later, a film like that will become a classic. Nada!”
Directed by the award-winning Curtis Hanson, the name behind hits like LA Confidential and The River Wild, Wonder Boys stood out for being earnest, realistic, and accessible in a way that made it enjoyable for those who didn’t have the privilege of an Ivy League education and featured a robust supporting cast that included Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr, Katie Holmes, Rip Torn, and Jane Adams to boot.
On paper, it sounded like a perfect pivot as in the ‘90s, Douglas had become known for playing dark, complex anti-heroes in psychological thrillers, and between Shining Through, Basic Instinct, Disclosure, The Game, The Ghost in the Darkness, and A Perfect Murder, he had become associated with a type of adult, provocative cinema that he wouldn’t be able to continue working on for the rest of his career.
Critics came to bat for the film too, and it ended up earning Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, ‘Best Editing’, as well as garnering a ‘Best Original Song’ victory for Bob Dylan’s ‘Things Have Changed’, but it was perceived a official disappointment, and Douglas himself went unrecognised by the Academy for his efforts.
Perhaps the actor feels the set irony where many of his top-grossing films, such as the Ant-Man sequels, are also some of his worst-reviewed, but hopefully, the genius of Wonder Boys will eventually shine through for the masses and be remembered for reasons other than how much it made or didn’t at the box office.
