Which movies does Tom Hanks hate?
A true paragon of Hollywood acting brilliance, Tom Hanks has been at the top of American cinema for the past four decades, consistently delivering some of the most memorable moments of the modern movie industry. Whether on the beaches of Normandy or being stranded in an airport, it’s fair to say that Hanks has more often than not come up trumps with the acting goods.
However, not every movie the Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan actor has made has landed in quite the way he wished it might have, whether for issues with story or production. In fact, Hanks has admitted that there are some movies from across his back catalogue that he truly “hates”, something he was not too proud to accept.
“OK, let’s admit this: We all have seen movies that we hate,” Hanks once told The New Yorker. “I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them.”
Hanks did not go on to point out any particular movies that he counts amongst those he truly hates but has previously expressed his “exhaustion” from the 2004 animated Christmas movie in which he voiced and motion-captured five characters. “There’s only so much that I can internally grasp as an actor,” he once told IGN. “And on the day of tests that we did, I played five or six or seven roles in the course of that day, and I said, ‘Bob [Zemeckis, director of the film], I’m exhausted here.'”
Of course, it’s worth considering the kind of films that Hanks has made that have not landed in the way they had been hopeful of. For instance, The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma, based on Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel of the same name, starring Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith, ought to have, on the surface, been of top quality considering the high-profile names attached, but the truth is that critics truly panned it and is likely to be one Hanks still has a sour taste in his mouth about.
In the New Yorker feature, Hanks explained that there is a process through which each actor must go through in order for a given movie to be properly assessed. “The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie,” the actor began. “The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.”
The third “Rubicon” is then the critical reception. “Someone is going to say, ‘I hated it,'” he said. “Other people can say, ‘I think it’s brilliant.’ Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is.” Then is commercial success “because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be.”
In that light, it’s likely that Hanks hated the way his 2020 film Greyhound went down as it was released in the midst of the Covid pandemic and thus bypassed its theatrical showing and went straight to home video and streaming instead, with Hanks once telling The Guardian, “It’s an absolute heartbreak. I don’t mean to make angry my Apple overlords, but there is a difference in picture and sound quality.”
In terms of critical reception, it’s also likely that Hanks is sour about how 2012’s Cloud Atlas was taken on by critics and audiences alike, with the Wachowskis and Tom Tykver science fiction movie, also starring Hugh Grant and Halle Berry, going “right over everybody’s heads”, according to Hanks.
Finally, the way a film is eventually appraised in the eyes of Hanks is the passing of time from the original release to when the film enters the general cultural milieu “where that movie lands twenty years after the fact”. So, while Hanks has never stated the exact films he hates of his own, his comments explain how he has a handful that he is not the best impressed with.
