The one genre Ron Howard is desperate to try: “There’s always that lingering curiosity”
Ron Howard has directed action thrillers, sentimental sci-fi movies, live-action remakes of animated classics, and movies set in space. He’s directed box office flops and box office hits. He’s won Oscars and he’s earned critical condemnation. He’s made Russell Crowe look like a good actor and Tom Hanks look like a bad actor. In short, he’s done just about everything, and that doesn’t even take his early acting career into consideration.
Throughout it all, the director has kept a remarkably unspoiled view of Hollywood and his position in it, regularly pointing out how lucky he is to be making movies and how much he still enjoys the process. While other directors grow more and more jaded, he remains one of the few stalwart optimists working a dream factory that runs on box office returns.
Howard’s filmography is full of variation, but there is one genre he has yet to tackle. On an ‘Ask Me Anything’ thread on Reddit in 2015, he revealed that “there’s always that lingering curiosity” about what it would be like to make a musical.
“Closest thing I’ve ever [done] was one sort of goofy number that Jim Carrey performed as the Grinch,” he said, referencing the actor’s rendition of ‘You’re A Mean One, Mr Grinch’ in 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. “[W]e shot it very quickly in a couple of days, but it was fun, and I’ve always thought it would be interesting to try to tackle that genre, but it’s a challenging one as well.”
Given Howard’s ability to blend scale with sentimentality in movies like Apollo 13 and Rush, it’s surprising that he hasn’t tackled a musical yet. He’s even shown his skills in the fantasy genre with Splash and Willow, so it stands to reason that he’d be the perfect hand to guide an adaptation of the sort of big-budget musical that Hollywood seems so enamoured of recently. If indie directors like Barry Jenkins, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Jacques Audiard can turn to the genre, there’s no reason Howard couldn’t.
In addition to musicals, the director noted that there is another genre he hasn’t explored yet: horror. “There’s a certain kind of horror that I always admire when it works,” he said, explaining that he has “brushed up against certain moments” of it in movies like Missing and Inferno, but that he would “be open to” doing more of it if he ever found a story that resonated with him.
Between musicals and horror, musicals seem like they would be more up Howard’s street, and as Hollywood turns to Broadway for inspiration with greater frequency, it’s very possible that we might see the director step into new territory. In the meantime, however, he has three films in development – a sci-fi movie set in space, a fantasy family movie about a shrinking child, and a drama about an FBI plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. In other words, even if he isn’t directing a musical anytime soon, he’s still out there showing his range.
