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Sat 1 August 2026 21:45, UK
Even though it’s been a long, long time since Ron Howard had a hit movie, he’s still one of the highest-grossing directors in cinema history, and he’ll stay that way for a long time.
Currently, there are only 11 filmmakers above him in the all-time rankings, and when the ones immediately below him include Chris Columbus, Roland Emmerich, and Gore Verbinski, it’ll be a while before he ever finds himself dislodged from that lucrative list.
Which is just as well, because recent years have been mighty lean. Even if you exclude Hillbilly Elegy and Thirteen Lives, which went straight to streaming, it’s been disappointment after disappointment for Howard at the box office, and even the ones that make money can’t be called successes.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is his top-earning picture of the last two decades, but because it cost so much to make and ended up as the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars film ever made, it lost money. He’ll keep getting work because he’s Ron Howard and he owns a production company, but those budgets might start getting lower if he doesn’t pick up a win sooner rather than later.
Of course, unless it’s a nailed-on franchise flick, there’s no way of guessing which titles are guaranteed to take off among audiences. Even when Howard directed one of those nailed-on franchise flicks, he failed to account for the idea of a prequel following a young Han Solo being completely and utterly redundant.
With seven decades of experience on both sides of the camera, dozens of features under his belt, and his vast experience as a producer under his belt, the two-time Academy Award winner knows better than to count his chickens before they’ve hatched, which is why there’s only one movie he knew would thrive, admitting that before it debuted, he was confident “this’ll be great business.”
“I probably felt that way about The Grinch,” he shared. “Although as we started the adaptation, I became pretty fascinated by it. And the big thing is, I talked about interesting collaborators. Well, I really did want to direct Jim Carrey creating that kind of physical comedy. And I wasn’t disappointed, he’s a genius. But I went into it because every company wanted to try to do The Grinch, and we could do it. And I thought it was a good idea.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Howard doesn’t like getting ahead of himself, but his instincts were right on the money. No film made more money at the domestic box office in the year 2000 than How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and it was the sixth-biggest release of the year worldwide, with the combination of an iconic title, Jim Carrey at the peak of his powers, and a festive debut powering it toward those heights.
Every director wants everything they make to be a hit, but it doesn’t always work that way, unless you’re Christopher Nolan. Howard had a sneaking suspicion about his Grinch, though, and for the first time in his life, he was able to say that his prediction was literally right on the money.
