The “tone-deaf” movie Ron Howard will always regret making: “It was a shocker”
As a filmmaker who never has a negative word to say about anything, Ron Howard admitting one of his movies caused him more disappointment than the rest carries extra weight, and not only because he’s helmed 28 features and counting.
Throughout his 70-year career, the former Happy Days favourite has refused to speak ill of anybody he’s worked with, even when he’s taking his revenge on an actor who dared question his authority. He’s made some bad films, and he’s acted in a few, too, but Howard has spent his life looking on the bright side.
Even when he knows his pictures haven’t performed anywhere near as well at the box office or among critics as he hoped, he’s not the kind of guy who’ll go full scorched-earth and tear his work apart. However, rules always have exceptions, and he’s got a point, seeing as the film in question was undoubtedly the worst he’d ever made at that point in his directorial life.
It took him until his 21st tilt behind the camera for Howard to hold his hands up, admit defeat, and agree with the general consensus that he’d churned out a stinker, and he had no bones pointing towards the prime offender when Vulture quizzed him on which of his pictures he considered the biggest disappointment.
“The Dilemma,” he answered. “It’s the last comedy I made, and I liked doing comedies. But it was a shocker, and from the test audiences, you could just see it didn’t have it. Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Brian Grazer, Universal, people who do a lot of comedies, we all thought we had something here. And it turned out that infidelity was not funny to people.”
Howard’s disdain for The Dilmmea runs so deep that it’s sworn him off an entire genre ever since, just in case he returns to comedy and fucks up again. He’s right in saying infidelity isn’t funny, and despite what John Wayne thought, it can be the basis for a solid movie, as Billy Wilder’s The Apartment showed.
Vaughn and James play a pair of longtime friends and business partners who find their bond being stretched when the latter spots the former’s married man out and about with another woman. It’s not the most offensive pitch for a Hollywood comedy, but it didn’t help matters that it wasn’t funny in the slightest.
“Everybody worked real hard on it and believed in it,” Howard maintained, always seeing the sunny side. “But it was an interesting example of being tone-deaf at that time.” In the end, the filmmaker’s last flirtation with comedy tanked at the box office and became the worst-reviewed movie of his career, so he’s not in the minority in saying he dropped the ball.
He’s made another seven features since then, and while Inferno and Hillbilly Elegy are arguably worse, The Dilemma did the most damage because it caused Howard to turn his back on the medium that launched his career with The Andy Griffith Show, solidified it with Happy Days, and steered him towards several of his finest flicks as a director.
