(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 26 December 2025 5:00, UK
Unlike most of his A-list contemporaries, Harrison Ford isn’t interested in anything other than acting. He hasn’t directed anything, he’s never been credited as a writer, and his only behind-the-scenes credits came when he was listed as an executive producer on K-19: The Widowmaker and Extraordinary Measures.
To be honest, that’s perfectly on-brand. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon is modern Hollywood’s ultimate no-frills superstar, having spent the last five decades cutting through the bullshit, getting straight to the point, and refusing to deal with the nonsense that comes with being a world-famous celebrity.
He reads the script, learns the lines, does the job, finishes the movie, and then goes home. Whereas many of cinema’s biggest stars like to spread their creative wings and plunge their fingers into as many pies as possible, Ford likes to do his bit and then call it a day. He constantly downplays his designation as a living legend, but you need some amount of power to make a studio push back the release date of a film you’re not even in.
Not just any film, either, but James Cameron’s Titanic, the most expensive production in cinema history, the industry’s first $200 million motion picture, and a record-tying Academy Award-botherer that would shatter almost every box office benchmark under the sun when it became the highest-grossing release of all time, and by a quite considerable distance, too.
In the summer of 1997, Ford and Wolfgang Petersen had their sights set on a July 25th release date for their bombastic action flick, Air Force One. It was virtually guaranteed to do a decent turn, but with Paramount’s Titanic and Warner Bros’ Richard Donner-directed Mel Gibson vehicle, Conspiracy Theory, planned to debut on the same day, the trio were in danger of cannibalising their audience.
Having been one of the studio’s top-drawing names for years after headlining the likes of the Indiana Jones trilogy, Witness, and his two outings as Jack Ryan, Ford made a phone call to Jonathan Dolgen, the head of Paramount’s owners, the Viacom Entertainment Group, threatening to sever ties with the company if it refused to budge.
“Harrison was definitely irritated,” his manager, Patricia McQueeney, told the Los Angeles Times. “He didn’t make any threats. He was not huffing and puffing. It was a friendly phone call. But Harrison did say, ‘Jonathan, what the hell are you guys doing?’ We’re very concerned about the whole situation.”
They also contacted Warner Bros about Conspiracy Theory, with McQueeney noting that “it’s bad business to open two movies on the same date, much less three of them.” James Cameron would no doubt deny it to his dying breath, but perhaps it’s not a coincidence that less than two weeks later, Titanic vacated the July 25th weekend and moved to December 19th instead.
Conspiracy Theory was also shifted to August 8th, and what did it knock off the top spot when it arrived? Ford’s Air Force One, which had held the number one slot for the previous two weekends. Instead of having all three released on the same day, they were separated, and they all debuted in first place, and they all made a lot of money, even if Titanic earned over three times as much as the other two combined.
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