{"id":1125180,"date":"2026-08-02T02:27:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T02:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1125180\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T02:27:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T02:27:19","slug":"the-only-movie-ron-howard-knew-was-guaranteed-to-be-a-hit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1125180\/","title":{"rendered":"The only movie Ron Howard knew was guaranteed to be a hit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ron<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Sat 1 August 2026 21:45, UK <\/p>\n

Even though it\u2019s been a long, long time since Ron Howard<\/a> had a hit movie, he\u2019s still one of the highest-grossing directors in cinema history, and he\u2019ll stay that way for a long time.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll be a while before he ever finds himself dislodged from that lucrative list.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s been disappointment after disappointment<\/a> for Howard at the box office, and even the ones that make money can\u2019t be called successes.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll keep getting work because he\u2019s Ron Howard and he owns a production company, but those budgets might start getting lower if he doesn\u2019t pick up a win sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

Of course, unless it\u2019s a nailed-on franchise flick, there\u2019s no way of guessing which titles are guaranteed to take off among audiences. Even when Howard directed one of those nailed-on franchise flicks<\/a>, he failed to account for the idea of a prequel following a young Han Solo being completely and utterly redundant.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve hatched, which is why there\u2019s only one movie he knew would thrive, admitting that before it debuted, he was confident \u201cthis\u2019ll be great business.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI probably felt that way about The Grinch,\u201d he shared. \u201cAlthough 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\u2019t disappointed, he\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Howard doesn\u2019t 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<\/a>, and a festive debut powering it toward those heights.<\/p>\n

Every director wants everything they make to be a hit, but it doesn\u2019t always work that way, unless you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still Sat 1 August 2026 21:45, UK Even though it\u2019s been a long,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1125181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3935],"tags":[102157,154906,281771,77,304824,178884,35230,3943,20770,16,15],"class_list":["post-1125180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-102157","tag-2000s","tag-comedy-movie","tag-entertainment","tag-fantasy-movie","tag-how-the-grinch-stole-christmas","tag-jim-carrey","tag-movies","tag-ron-howard","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117023556786137100","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1125180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1125181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1125180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1125180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1125180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}