The movie that almost broke Julia Roberts
There have been several instances in cinematic history when a film has simply crashed. Whether due to casting controversies, poor timing, or a failure to connect with audiences, directors throughout history have been left reeling when projects they poured time and effort into flop at the box office. Actors, too, must share in the embarrassment and disappointment when a film underperforms. However, for Julia Roberts, her biggest box office failure wasn’t just about poor reception—she was simply relieved to have survived making the film.
Failure films are interesting though as so often, they take on a second life. Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is the perfect example. It’s a god-awful movie, often considered one of the worst ever made, yet people rush out to special screenings of it with Wiseau himself in attendance. It’s become a cult classic that people hold dear to them, despite the film being painful.
Steven Spielberg’s Hook was the same, albeit in a much less extreme form. Despite the powerful director, a powerful cast, and a big budget of $70million, something about the film just didn’t work. It’s not that it didn’t perform well enough at the box office, but given the spend on the film and the scale of the project, the studio expected it to do much, much better and wrote it off as a failure when it only really coasted along.
Part of the issue was that when the film was released, it got swept up in a media circus that had nothing to do with the quality of the movie but rather the private life of the cast. In 1991, when the movie was released, Julia Roberts, who played Tinker Bell, was engaged to Kiefer Sutherland. It was a high-profile couple that people were invested in, especially in the immediate run-up to their upcoming wedding. But only days before the nuptials, it fell apart.
Or at least, that’s what the press reported. According to Roberts in interviews since, it was a mutual decision to call the engagement off and one that was reached long before the scheduled ceremony. But in the eyes of the media and the public, Roberts had essentially been jilted right before her wedding, and that story clouded the entire release of Hook.
Imagine going through something hard in your personal life, and suddenly, you have to do all these interviews promoting a project while people keep prying. Back in the ‘90s as well, in the heyday of paparazzi, Roberts was being hounded with the additional press surrounding the film being her own personal hell.
Or in “Tinkerhell”, as an article in Premiere read at the time. There were even rumours that the situation with her fiance had also impacted the atmosphere on set, with that article calling her a “curious presence” on set that was “sometimes somber, sometimes at the near edge of hysteria.”
But while the press seemed intent on piling it all on the actor, Spielberg came to the defence of his star. “Julia probably went through the most trying times of her life, and it was simply bad timing for all of us that she happened to start on Hook at that low point,” the director said. But in his eyes, she pulled it off as he called her performance “terrific”.
