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Sat 14 June 2025 20:15, UK
For most of the last 40 years, John Goodman has been one of Hollywood’s most enduring actors. From indie dramas to comedies, and from blockbusters to animated flicks and horror movies, Goodman’s talents know no bounds, and he’s always a welcome presence in any film.
However, Goodman’s status in the industry wasn’t always so set in stone. In fact, in the early 1990s, buoyed by his sitcom success on Roseanne, Hollywood pushed Goodman as a leading man in a series of films like King Ralph, The Babe, Matinee, and Born Yesterday. Unfortunately for him, King Ralph was the only one of these movies that was successful at the box office, and it led to rumours of a ‘John Goodman curse’ that would prevent his movies from making money.
“Goodman is a great guy and a talented character actor, but let’s face it: Add up the budgets of those pictures where he’s the star, and you’re looking at about $200million flushed down the drain,” an unnamed source at Universal Pictures told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.
While this quote does seem to overestimate the production and advertising budgets of those films pretty wildly, the sentiment was clear: Goodman needed a hit.
The role that could make or break John Goodman
So, against his better judgement, Goodman signed up for a family blockbuster that would be his biggest play for movie stardom yet. Interestingly, he had been pegged for the role five years earlier by none other than Steven Spielberg, who told him in front of the cast and crew at the first table read for 1989’s Always, “I’ve found my Fred Flintstone.”
By the time Spielberg’s live-action version of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon became a reality in 1994, though, Goodman admitted it had been a rocky road toward accepting his destiny as Bedrock’s favourite Stone Age everyman. He confessed to feeling “a little apprehensive about taking the role” and said, “It was kind of ordained on me by Spielberg”.
He also began to think it would never come to pass, as a reported 32 different writers endlessly reworked the script to Spielberg’s satisfaction. In fact, even the final shooting script was the work of eight scribes throwing jokes at the wall to see what stuck. “It was off and on so many times until they came up with a script they liked,” Goodman remembered.
As for any ‘Goodman curse’, the actor did his best to play it off, but confessed that he was frustrated that his previous efforts hadn’t been more warmly received, as any star would be. “I’m sorry people feel that way,” he said. “You know…once my job is done, I try not to think about it. I’m disappointed like everyone else that Babe went into the toilet because everybody thought it would do well.”
Unfortunately, a negative buzz began building around The Flintstones well before its release, with industry insiders and movie audiences everywhere becoming aware that early reviews deemed it a misfire. To these naysayers, the film was caught in an uncomfortable middle ground between a kids’ flick and a nostalgic comedy that adults who grew up on the cartoon could enjoy. Even Goodman, as the film’s star, acknowledged that the plot was wafer-thin, although he followed that up by quipping, “But we are talking about The Flintstones.”
Ultimately, Goodman was keen for The Flintstones to be the box office behemoth he needed to convince Hollywood that he wasn’t a bad luck charm, so he mused, “I think it works; I hope so.” This struck more of blind optimism than any genuine belief in the film’s quality, though, and Goodman’s fears were borne out when critics savaged the film.
While his half-hearted faith that the movie would turn out OK couldn’t have been more wrong, there was a silver lining to the whole sorry affair: the film raked in $341.6million worldwide, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no Goodman curse. Or, at the very least, that people really, really liked that old cartoon.
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