Are movie audiences falling out of love with Tom Hanks?
Here should have been a hit. The film reunites Tom Hanks with Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis and writer Eric Roth for the first time since Forrest Gump. It is, for all intents and purposes, a spiritual successor to the much-loved mega hit, which fans have been begging for a sequel to since 1994.
And yet the studio has been unable to translate any of that reunion buzz into box-office success – or even word-of-mouth success. Released in the US back in November, Here fizzled, floundered and then flopped. Recouping just 10 per cent of its $50m (£41m) budget, it is now, months later, being released in the UK without so much as a whisper.
How things have changed. Some 20 years ago, the name Tom Hanks translated directly into dollar signs. His involvement in something would have ignited a frenzy – now, it doesn’t seem to generate so much as a jostle. Which poses the question: are audiences switching off from America’s most-loved everyman?
From the late Eighties to the Noughties, Hanks was ubiquitous. In the early days, he exuded boyish charm: he was completely delightful and believable as a 13-year-old in a grown-up body in Big, without a thimbleful of malice in his 6ft frame. He parlayed that into leading-man gravitas, genuine movie-star power in films like Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
His IMDb page from that time reads like a cross-section of everyone’s favourite films: A League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, The Green Mile, Catch Me If You Can, Toy Story 1,2 and 3. Truly, Hanks has one of the best filmographies going. He’s always had the acting chops, too, becoming the second actor ever to win consecutive Oscars, first for his lovable performance in Forrest Gump and then for his indelible, nuanced portrayal of a man with Aids in Philadelphia.
At the turn of the century, Hanks was placed third in The Hollywood Reporter’s list of most bankable stars – after Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson, but before Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, and Jim Carrey. In 2002, he rose to No 2, where he remained in 2006, second only to his action-star namesake. Here was an actor who could sell a movie – any movie! – with the sheer fact of his presence in it.
Somewhere along the way, that changed. These days, there seems to be a perception taking hold that Hanks has (gulp!) fallen off, but perhaps that’s an unfair assessment of a more complicated situation. After all, he does continue to turn in the occasional slam-dunk. There was Captain Phillips in 2013 and Sully in 2016. He was pitch-perfect as the affable Mr Rogers in 2019’s modest box-office hit A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. More shockingly, viewers also loved A Man Called Otto (an English-language remake of a much better Swedish film). But for the most part, it’s been a lukewarm last decade for the actor.
Greyhound, News of the World, Finch... do these words mean anything to you? Released during the pandemic, these Hanks movies went straight to streaming, where they enjoyed brief applause before dying a quiet death. Even Hanks’s journalism thriller The Post, well received by critics and fans, has been all but forgotten – doomed to play second fiddle to the better, more memorable Spotlight. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City was also fantastic, and Hanks was fantastic in it, but that wasn’t a “Tom Hanks film”, really. In fact, he hasn’t had a true star vehicle since his lead role in Sully, which was almost 10 years ago now.
Maybe Hanks isn’t falling off, but one thing is certain: he isn’t as sure a thing as he used to be. There was a time when “starring Tom Hanks” was a byword for a first-rate film, a trusted seal of approval. But his latest act is dogged by inconsistency: a hit here, a dud there, plenty of forgettable fodder in between. For someone who was once so enviably reliable, Hanks is now a little more erratic.
That said, he isn’t totally to blame – the bankable movie star, such as Hanks once was, is a dying breed that one might argue consists only of Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Hanks’s Philadelphia co-star Denzel Washington – but some quality control is definitely in order. Or at the very least, a scaling back. Eight films in the past five years is simply too many; scarcity creates demand, after all. When Washington, for example, does deign to appear on screen, it is a cinematic event.
It is perhaps also time to take a chance or two. Hanks is 68 now, and I can count his risky career moves on one hand. One finger, even. No matter how you feel about his performance as Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis, it at least got people talking. And that Dutch accent won’t be forgotten any time soon. Could a villainous Hugh Grant-style pivot help matters? Potentially. Perhaps a 180 is exactly what Hanks’s career needs in order to break this spell of middle-of-the-road roles.
Take James Stewart, an actor to whom Hanks was so often compared in his early career. Both men embodied the wholesome, all-American type, with their cherubic grins and unruly hair made for mussing. In Stewart’s later life, those quintessential roles gave way to more complex characters, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rear Window.
Admittedly, Hanks has once or twice tried to switch it up – as with his bizarre turn in the Coen Brothers’ flop The Ladykillers – but he will always retreat to the safety of his good-guy roots. Probably because we keep rewarding him for doing so: the last of his performances to be truly acclaimed was his portrayal of kids’ TV host Mr Rogers – a Tom Hanks role if there ever was one. But stay still too long and you become stagnant. At the end of the day, something needs to change, because at this rate, Hanks’s best films are behind him – and I say that as a Tom Hanks fan. What a shame that would be.
‘Here’ is in UK cinemas now
