Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Tue 4 August 2026 20:45, UK
Even though he was already a teenager by the time the 1970s had even started, Billy Bob Thornton gives off the impression of a man who rues the fact that he was born at least two decades too late.
He’s always been adamant that 1973 was the greatest year in music history, and while that coincided with the end of his high school years, you get the sneaking suspicion that he’d have much rather been of an age where he could drink, do drugs, and follow his favourite bands around the country on tour.
Similarly, he believes that U2 and REM are the only legendary bands to have emerged since the ’70s drew to a close, and based on the music he’s spent most of his life recording, it’s hard to think of him as anything other than a man out of time, clinging on to the glory days he was technically there to witness, but not in the way he’d have ideally wanted to witness them.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that one of the proudest moments of his movie days, which came in a picture that very few people could have given less of a shit about, no matter how hard they tried, led him to theorise that it wouldn’t have been such an unmitigated disaster had it been made and released in, you guessed it, the ’70s.
If you want to split hairs, it probably wouldn’t have been made in the ’70s anyway, because there had already been several high-profile releases based on the exact same subject matter, and one of them starred one of the most iconic leading men in Hollywood history. Still, he’s allowed to regret things the way he wants to.
“One of the things in my career in which I’m most proud of is playing Davy Crockett, because all those guys at the Alamo were heroes to me,” he said. “From now on, I can know I played Davy Crockett in The Alamo, and that will be cinematic history, you know? John Wayne played him, too, but I was told by historians that we made the most historically accurate movie that’s been made about the Alamo.”
That’s all well and good, but it would help if anyone bothered to see it. Director John Lee Hancock’s historical epic, which Thornton called “a truly great movie,” cost over $100 million to produce, and earned a shade over $25 million from cinemas, got absolutely slammed by critics, and, by ending up almost $150 million in the red, it became one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Why? Not because it was rubbish. No, according to Thornton, it was because of those damned youths. “I think it didn’t do better at the box office because 14-year-olds go to movies, and 14-year-olds don’t give a shit about history anymore,” he pondered. “I think if the whole movie had been about a battle, it might have been different. But it wasn’t.”
It surely couldn’t have had anything to do with The Alamo being terrible, or that nobody asked for it, wanted it, or needed to exist, or its years spent lingering in development hell. Nope, it was those pesky teenagers and their apathy toward the past. “I think if that movie had come out in the ’70s, it would have done very well,” he added, apparently forgetting that Wayne’s Alamo had come out in the ’60s and it nearly bankrupted him.
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