The classic Ron Howard movie test audiences hated: “More Hollywood bullshit”
Ron Howard is the sweetheart of Hollywood, growing up in the eyes of the global audiences after his early career as a child actor and eventually becoming one of the most commercially successful directors of his generation. Whether it be his delightfully evil spin on the Christmas tale through Jim Carrey’s portrayal of The Grinch, A Beautiful Mind or The Da Vinci Code, the director has found his niche through blockbuster projects that appeal to mass family audiences, something that he has been honing since early films like Splash and Willow.
Over the years, he has formed a fruitful partnership with Tom Hanks, collaborating with the actor on countless films that have also defined his personal legacy on the silver screen, as well as working with stars like Tom Cruise, Amy Adams, and Nicole Kidman. However, despite reaching the height of Hollywood fame through these many beloved projects, there was one cult film that was initially met with some very harsh feedback.
Test screenings are an age-old practice in the film industry, with producers and studio executives gathering an unsuspecting group of people to ‘test’ their reaction to an upcoming release. They have been known to aggravate and sometimes provoke the people watching with violent reactions to controversial classics, where audiences have been known to leave brutal comments in response to films that later rocked the world.
However, as much as directors might watch these screenings through their fingers and brace themselves for a wave of abuse that confirms their worst fears about their work, Ron Howard was surprisingly met with very positive feedback after screening his 1995 film Apollo 13.
The film tells the true story of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, tracking the experiences of Jim Lovell and his crew on the failed journey, drifting in space more than 2000 miles from Earth. Tom Hanks stars in the lead role, with his infamous delivery of the line, “Houston, we have a problem” becoming a legendary moment not only from the film, but from cinematic history as a whole.
However, despite the generally positive audience response, Howard received one scathing note that stuck with him. The director described this brutal piece of feedback, saying, “But of course, even though I already had achieved final cut status as a director, I still had to look at that one test card and find out what the problem was with this audience member. They never use names, but it was a Caucasian Asian male, 23 years old who rated it poor and said he wouldn’t recommend it. He didn’t really comment much in the way of words, but on the back, he did answer one question. It said, please comment on the ending or the resolution. He wrote: ‘It’s terrible’ with an exclamation mark. ‘More Hollywood bullshit,’ two exclamation marks. ‘They would never survive,’ with three exclamation marks. I realised nobody had told the audience about this movie, and this kid didn’t know that this story had really happened”.
This surely gave Howard a laugh after realising that this audience member had been failed so spectacularly by the education system, and so these harsh remarks did not have any impact on the overall edit of the film.
