Tom Hanks is willing to admit that he’s not a massive fan of some of his past films.
Speaking to The New Yorker, the Man Called Otto star explained that most actors have no idea whether or not a movie they’re in is going to be any good.
In fact, Tom, who has been a Hollywood fixture since the 1980s, even admitted that he’s not a huge fan of many of his films.
“OK, let’s admit this: We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them,” Tom confessed.
And the Circle star (which, by the way, is one of his movies that has a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 15%) has been in some serious stinkers.
Tom’s films that are largely believed to be some of his worst – at least according to online rankings – include 1985’s The Man With One Red Shoe, 1990’s The Bonfire Of The Vanities and 2004’s The Terminal.
He didn’t go as far as naming specific movies he’s been in that he didn’t like, but he did try to explain why he’s ended up in some flops.
Tom told the magazine that there are “five points of the Rubicon” that every actor experiences when they sign up to be in a movie.
“The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie,” he 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.”
Tom went on to say the third “Rubicon” is the critical reception, which he described as “a version of the vox populi.”
“Someone is going to say, ‘I hated it.’ Other people can say, ‘I think it’s brilliant.’ Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is.” Hanks’ fourth “Rubicon” is a movie’s commercial success “because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be.”
The fifth “Rubicon,” Tom said, is time: “Where that movie lands 20 years after the fact.”
Tom uses his 1996 film, That Thing You Do! as an example of his last point.
“I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it,” Tom said.
“When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd, kinda quasi-ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane.
“Now, the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review called it ’Tom Hanks’s cult classic, That Thing You Do!. So now it’s a cult classic. What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time.”
Tom may have a point. Kirsten Dunst spoke openly in 2019 about how many of her early films were initially lambasted but gained more recognition years later.
“Well, remember when Marie Antoinette — y’all panned it? And now you all love it. Remember Drop Dead Gorgeous? Panned. Now you all love it,” Kirsten lamented during an appearance on the SiriusXM show In Depth With Larry Flick.