Josh Brolin on His ‘Jonah Hex’ Movie: ‘Hated it. Hated It.’
Josh Brolin is very excited about his place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where he’s playing Thanos, the villainous mastermind scheming to destroy Earth and The Avengers. He is not so excited about his first role in a comic book movie, 2010’s Jonah Hex, based the DC Comics character of the same name. Brolin did not mince words recently when he said he “hated it.” And if you didn’t quite understand how serious he was, he repeated it one more time. “Hated it.”
Brolin was talking to Nerdist (via The Playlist) and explained, beyond the obvious, his particular beef with this movie:
Oh, Jonah Hex, hated it. Hated it. The experience of making it — that would have been a better movie based on what we did. As opposed to what ended up happening to it, which is going back and reshooting 66 pages in 12 days and that being… Listen, I understand it’s financiers, you’re trying to save their money and it becomes a financial thing… I remember when I was talking to Warner Bros. about doing that movie, High Plains Drifter is what I put on the TV, I said, ‘That’s what I wanna do.’ I would do that movie still ‘cause that’s the version of that movie that would have been successful, for sure. And it didn’t need to cost anything more than $8-$10 million.
Instead the film cost about $80 million and made a paltry $10 million at the box office.
Though DC and Warner Bros. were hot to start developing their in-house comic characters (Iron Man and Iron Man 2 had already hit theaters by the time Jonah Hex was released and both Thor and Captain America were on the way), they gambled on Jonah Hex, a little-known character, and lost big. The project was in trouble before it even started. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) had signed on to direct the film, but dropped out weeks before shooting was set to begin. They were replaced by Jimmy Hayward, whose only previous directing gig was the animated comedy Horton Hears a Who. Not exactly a match made in heaven. (Though considering what Neveldine and Taylor did with Ghost Rider perhaps their version wouldn’t have been much better.)
Unfortunately the film wasted a great cast. Aside from Brolin, the film starred Michael Fassbender, Megan Fox, Michael Shannon and John Malkovich. Perhaps there is/was a great Jonah Hex movie out there somewhere, but we didn’t see it then, and based on how poorly the film did, we won’t ever see it again.