Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros.
Fri 7 August 2026 20:45, UK
There comes a time in every fading star’s life when they need to face the facts and accept their days as a top-level actor are over. For Burt Reynolds, one specific year of his career confirmed those fears.
Honesty, it had been coming for a while, and he knew it. He’d spent five consecutive years as the most bankable leading man in Hollywood, but once he fell off the top rung of the ladder for the first time, he’d spent the rest of his professional life hovering around the bottom, bar the occasional exception.
As Reynolds himself acknowledged, 1983’s Stroker Ace was the deal-breaker. He could have played Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning role in Terms of Endearment, but he turned it down, instead opting to make another formulaic genre film with friend and frequent cohort Hal Needham, and that was that.
He called it the exact moment he lost his audience, and he never really got them back. There was also the not-insignificant matter of suffering an injury so severe on the set of City Heat the following year that he almost died and ended up becoming caught in the throes of a painkiller addiction, so it was hardly self-sabotage.
It was a little bit, and in an effort to recoup the money he’d lost out on by being out of action for so long, Reynolds started accepting every offer that came his way. “I trusted my manager with my money during my illness,” he shared. “Now I was broke. Money woes stayed with me. I grabbed whatever pictures were offered.”
That led him to make three in quick succession, and they all flopped tremendously. The unanimously panned action thriller Malone was released in May 1987, and it tanked. In February, he’d wrapped shooting on the tedious comedic thriller Rent-A-Cop, which debuted in November, and also tanked.
Between April and June, he was occupied primarily by his feud with Kathleen Turner during the making of Switching Channels, and when the workplace comedy arrived on the big screen, that tanked, too. Suddenly, something painful occurred to Reynolds: he was a man out of time, and there was no chance he’d be able to convince audiences that he was anything but.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“Admittedly, films like Malone, Rent-a-Cop, and Switching Channels, helped my bank account,” he pointed out. “But they were making me part of an endangered species: an old actor. However, there are times when you can be artistic, and times when you have to be realistic.”
He’d been well-paid for all three, but mirroring the financial rewards being the same, the commercial risks were also identical: not a single one of them would sniff a penny of profit or a good review, and that was a pattern that would largely continue throughout the remainder of Reynolds’ increasingly sketchy filmography.
