Josh Brolin holds nothing back when reflecting on his role in 2010 superhero movie Jonah Hex, though he does regret where some of his vitriol has been aimed.
The film adaptation of the famous comic book was a box office bust, grossing just $11 million despite a $47 million budget. It also owns a 12 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating and a Metacritic score of 33.
Fourteen years later, Brolin, 56, has gained some perspective on the experience.
“It’s funny because I’ve always spoken about it in a way that I think is disrespectful to the director. I don’t think it was the director’s fault, I think he did his best,” Brolin told Yahoo in an interview published on Thursday, February 29.
The director, Jimmy Hayward, also wrote and directed 2013 animated comedy Free Birds and owns animation credits for Finding Nemo, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and more.
Brolin’s comments are a stark change from what he’s said previously about the film. He told Variety last year that Hayward, 53, didn’t have the requisite experience and didn’t treat the movie with the respect it deserved, opting to go out partying instead.
“I just think we made a big mistake with the director — not to blame it all at him, because that was my choice, that was my bad choice,” he said.
A year later, Brolin and Hayward have reportedly reconnected, and the actor has a different view.
“I think it was a piece of s–t film but for many different reasons, and I’m included in that too,” Brolin continued on Thursday. “But you know we can’t win them all, it happens. I mean I brought in a lot of really good people, I brought in [John] Malkovich, I brought in Megan [Fox], I brought in [Michael] Fassbender who hadn’t really hit yet — he’d done some great work, but he hadn’t really hit yet — I brought in Michael Shannon, but he was cut out.”
Brolin added that even though he did not like the final product, the movie did not have to be the bomb that it became.
“I don’t know what happened, but it happened, just careened a little bit, hit a couple cars, everybody survived,” he said. “But I don’t think it was Jimmy Hayward’s fault, I think that’s a misconception. He was a big Jonah Hex fan, we gave him a shot.”
Brolin went on to blame some of the film’s faults on the studio. “[Jimmy] directed a pretty good movie and then the studio took it and made it a much worse movie,” the actor claimed. “I’ve seen that happen a couple of times — once you get into pandering, [into] what you think the audience wants based on a cosmetic understanding, or at least a pretend understanding, of what you think an audience wants, which nobody ever knows.”
