Tom Hanks Becomes Frank About One Of His Worst Movies, Explains Why It Failed
No one would ever question the fact that Tom Hanks is an incredible actor, hands down one of our best. Two-time Oscar winner continues to entertain by playing Mr. Rogers (A beautiful day in the neighborhood), appearing in westerns (the Yellowstone spin-off 1883), and make an appearance in a Borat following. He even did Bullfinch. But Hanks will be the first person to tell you that not every movie he’s made has been perfect, or even viewable. And when it comes to the 1990 adaptation of The bonfire of vanities, Hanks knows it sucks and even understands why.
Although Tom Hanks had a handful of massive hits before playing a Wall Street bond trader in the black comedy The bonfire of vanities, he was not yet the Hollywood “royalty” that many consider him to be today. Yes he had done Big (1988) and Splash (1984) at this point, but he was still looking for his place with hiccups such as Volunteers (1985), Turner & Hooch (1989) and Joe against the volcano (1990). Bonfire likely seemed like a genealogy piece, a possible awards contender, but Hanks revealed to The Blast some of the reasons the movie didn’t perform at any level when he recently said:
When we were doing it, this movie was huge. We couldn’t move anywhere in New York. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was wrong, me in particular. … Brian De Palma deals more with iconography than cinema. He’s the most uncompromising filmmaker – both good and bad – you’ve ever met. He’s the guy who made Scarface. So his perspective was just one of those things.
One of the problems The bonfire of vanities is that the source novel by famous author Tom Wolfe was an overnight success that had a huge influence on the cultural scene. Adapting him was always going to present problems, and Hanks readily admits he was not the right person to play Sherman McCoy, a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe” on Wall Street whose life collapses after being involved. in a hit and run. Course. McCoy is a superficially evil character, and although Hanks is a talented actor, audiences wanted to see him as the sympathetic comedian he had embraced in his previous comedies.
Opening more on the film’s issues, Hanks admits:
You can’t take a book like Tom Wolfe’s that changed the way people talk and think and turn it into a palatable movie, or change the focus of what the source material is about. It may not translate in a way that will work.
For a moment, The bonfire of vanities became an easy punchline in Hollywood to quickly refer to a failed movie. Tom Hanks wasn’t the only reason the film fell … not by far. To get a better idea of how and why this film wasted its chances of success, read the 1991 book The Devil’s Candy, one of the most influential behind-the-scenes tales in Hollywood history.
The good thing about Tom Hanks is that he survived the stench of Fire. And the film will exist forever as an example that no Hollywood artist is completely Teflon and free from mistakes.
