The flop movie that made Ron Howard question his career: “It was pretty painful”
Ron Howard has had his fair share of successes throughout his career. Not many people can credibly claim to have been professionally successful at the age of five, and those who can are rarely able to claim that things just got better for them from there. Beginning his career as a child actor, Howard transitioned from playing wholesome, freckled, quintessentially American characters in the 1950s and ‘60s into directing in the ‘70s when he was still in the earliest moments of most people’s careers.
He turned out to be pretty good at it. Movies like Splash, Cocoon, and Parenthood proved that he was adept at bringing sentimentality to various genres without the films coming across as overly manipulative, and his directing career quickly eclipsed his early work as an actor. In 1995, he directed the now classic Tom Hanks astronaut historical drama Apollo 13, and in 2002, he reached the pinnacle of the industry when he won two Oscars, ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture,’ for A Beautiful Mind.
Throughout nearly all of Howard’s movies runs a theme of basic human decency. According to his films, love and integrity conquer all, and everyone can rise to the occasion when called upon. The director has an air of sunny optimism about him, too. It isn’t just a residual sheen from his roles in The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days. In interviews, he exudes a kind of aw-shucks humility and enthusiasm for filmmaking that is infectious. However, according to him, that can-do attitude was almost defeated at one point in his career.
In a 1994 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Howard revealed that the critical failure of his 1992 romantic epic, Far Away, nearly broke his spirit. “It was pretty painful,” he said. “I kept thinking what am I going to do when I have an actual, bonafide flop — which is more or less inevitable?”
Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Irish immigrants who look for land in the United States in the 1890s, Far Away is a nearly two-and-a-half hour epic that critics blasted for being bloated and unoriginal. Several compared it unfavourably to the work of director David Lean, whose movies like Lawrence of Arabia and the Irish romantic drama Ryan’s Daughter were known for their epic scope. With a budget of $60 million, Far and Away was an expensive foray into new territory for Howard, who said that its challenges were largely logistical rather than creative.
Still, Far and Away had a decent showing at the box office. Thanks in large part to the fame of Cruise and Kidman, who were married at the time and were a constant source of fodder for the press, it earned $60million domestically and $130million worldwide. For Howard, however, it was a crushing disappointment and had the happy consequence of sending him back to his roots.
His next film, The Paper, was a star-studded workplace comedy about a sleazy tabloid editor played by Michael Keaton. A year later, he scored the biggest hit of his career to date with Apollo 13.
