{"id":185587,"date":"2025-06-15T05:34:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T05:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/185587\/"},"modified":"2025-06-15T05:34:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T05:34:11","slug":"the-role-john-goodman-couldnt-have-been-more-wrong-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/185587\/","title":{"rendered":"The role John Goodman couldn’t have been more wrong about"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"John<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n

Sat 14 June 2025 20:15, UK <\/p>\n

For most of the last 40 years, John Goodman<\/a> has been one of Hollywood\u2019s most enduring actors. From indie dramas to comedies, and from blockbusters to animated flicks and horror movies, Goodman\u2019s talents know no bounds, and he\u2019s always a welcome presence in any film. <\/p>\n

However, Goodman\u2019s status in the industry wasn\u2019t 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 \u2018John Goodman curse\u2019 that would prevent his movies from making money.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoodman is a great guy and a talented character actor<\/a>, but let\u2019s face it: Add up the budgets of those pictures where he\u2019s the star, and you\u2019re looking at about $200million flushed down the drain,\u201d an unnamed source at Universal Pictures told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The role that could make or break John Goodman<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, who told him in front of the cast and crew at the first table read for 1989\u2019s Always, \u201cI\u2019ve found my Fred Flintstone.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Spielberg\u2019s 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\u2019s favourite Stone Age everyman. He confessed to feeling \u201ca little apprehensive about taking the role<\/a>\u201d and said, \u201cIt was kind of ordained on me by Spielberg\u201d.<\/p>\n

He also began to think it would never come to pass, as a reported 32 different writers endlessly reworked the script to Spielberg\u2019s satisfaction. In fact, even the final shooting script was the work of eight scribes throwing jokes at the wall to see what stuck. \u201cIt was off and on so many times until they came up with a script they liked,\u201d Goodman remembered. <\/p>\n

As for any \u2018Goodman curse\u2019, the actor did his best to play it off, but confessed that he was frustrated that his previous efforts hadn\u2019t been more warmly received, as any star would be. \u201cI\u2019m sorry people feel that way,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know\u2026once my job is done, I try not to think about it. I\u2019m disappointed like everyone else that Babe went into the toilet because everybody thought it would do well.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 flick and a nostalgic comedy that adults who grew up on the cartoon could enjoy. Even Goodman, as the film\u2019s star, acknowledged that the plot was wafer-thin, although he followed that up by quipping, \u201cBut we are talking about The Flintstones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Goodman was keen for The Flintstones to be the box office behemoth he needed to convince Hollywood that he wasn\u2019t a bad luck charm, so he mused, \u201cI think it works; I hope so.\u201d This struck more of blind optimism than any genuine belief in the film\u2019s quality, though, and Goodman\u2019s fears were borne out when critics savaged the film. <\/p>\n

While his half-hearted faith that the movie would turn out OK couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still) Sat 14 June 2025 20:15, UK For most of the last 40…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,14263,3943,11820,76058,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-185587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-john-goodman","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-steven-spielberg","12":"tag-the-flintstones","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114685756459551320","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185587","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=185587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}