“It’s not a terrible film”: the only one of his awful movies Burt Reynolds was willing to defend
There has never been an A-list movie star quite like Burt Reynolds, who has always been honest about his career, for better or worse.
He leapt onto cinemas in the ‘70s with films like The Longest Yard and Deliverance, proving to be an undeniable force of charisma, and by the time Smokey and the Bandit hit theatres in the summer of 1977, where it was competing directly against Star Wars, Reynolds was easily the biggest star in the world.
However, his rise to prominence was followed by a sharp decline, as the next two decades saw him starring in a number of critical and commercial disasters, and although critics were harsh, Reynolds was even harder on himself, often expressing frustration and disappointment about the bad films he appeared in, which was rare for someone of his fame.
Ironically, Reynolds was frequently more critical than the actual critics. While he lambasted Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which he called “immoral”, the film was perceived to be an instant classic, and earned him the first Academy Award nomination of his entire career in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category.
As temperamental as he was, Reynolds also wasn’t willing to roll over and accept blanket critiques of his work if he didn’t feel that they were well-founded, and particularly took issue with the backlash to a 1981 comedy in which he co-starred with Beverly D’Angelo. ”I never understood why the critics were so hostile to Paternity,” he said, “I always knew what kind of picture it was. I didn’t buy any tuxedos for the awards shows when I made that film, but it’s not a terrible film. I think it got the worst reviews that I’ve had in eight or nine years.”
Reynolds may have been annoyed by reviews that he didn’t feel were fair, but he always believed that a sign of a film’s success was whether audiences were willing to trek out and see it, noting, “Reviews of my movies have usually been bad, but 83 per cent of the movies still made money. I keep track of these things. Paternity probably eventually will turn a profit. By my standards and by the studio’s standards, it will be a tremendous flop because it didn’t make $45million. Of course, if IBM made a $2million profit this year, everyone would say, ‘what a fantastic year’.”
The actor also wasn’t concerned about the instantaneous reaction to Paternity, but he did express some trepidation regarding the impact that film critics had on a film’s box office.
“For me, a $2 million profit is a disaster, but what scared me more than anything else was that for the first time, the reviews really did have an effect on box office,” Reynolds said, “They kept people away”.
He was not as actively involved in making new films during the era in which Rotten Tomatoes and other online review databases would create scores for films, which had an even more significant impact on whether audiences went to buy a ticket. At the same time, there are still plenty of films that appear to essentially be ‘critic-proof’, such as Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Fate of the Furious, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Minions, which, despite receiving scathing reviews, made boatloads of money, with even the remake of The Lion King managing to gross over $1billion at the global box office.
