The Nineteen Eighties were good to the manufacturing partnership of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. While Simpson was known as something of a shit heel in Hollywood, he got results, and with Bruckheimer helping him out, those results were value billions. Starting in 1983, when their first film together Flashdance, garnered $201.5 million from a $7 million budget, they were untouchable. After that the duo went on a run, producing banger after banger with Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and Beverly Hills Cop II combining to make nearly a billion on the box office. But their 1990 film — one other Tom Cruise vehicle, Days of Thunder — flopped hard and marked the tip of the road for this kind of now-formulaic picture.
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Days of Thunder made a paltry $157.9 million from its inflated $70 million budget. Considering that Top Gun cost just $19 million to make, and returned over 20 times that in theater ticket sales, it just wasn’t what Simpson/Bruckheimer, or Cruise for that matter, were used to. Why did a movie about automobile racing cost greater than three and a half times what it cost to make Top Gun, a movie about fighter jets?
Because Simpson and Bruckheimer got too big for his or her britches and wouldn’t let BAFTA-award-winning director Tony Scott, uh, direct. Meaning the crew was just hanging out getting paid ridiculous time beyond regulation for all of the wasted hours while the ship with 4 captains listed aimlessly toward nothing. Plus, you understand, all the cocaine.
The Simpson/Bruckheimer partnership was made for the Nineteen Eighties, as they produced beautiful action-packed movies populated by beautiful people, with perfect needle drops. They were answerable for a few of the most effective movies of the last decade. With all of that success behind them, they were in a position to ask for, and get, whatever they wanted. Simpson allegedly blew studio money on his own beach-side gym to draw women, whom he would ply with gifts and experiences as a way of seduction.
It only took five months from the discharge of Days of Thunder for Paramount to kick the money-leaching partnership out of the home and tear up their five-film contract. Look, I like this film, but it surely was never going to be the large success of Top Gun. There’s no denying that this can be a Nineteen Eighties movie, despite having come out in 1990. But it surely killed the form of movie that the Nineteen Eighties were known for: Character-driven slick pictures with montages and overcoming adversity with natural talent were out, and this movie was the tip of all of it.
Go watch it again, only for the hell of it, with this added context. It’s great, but it surely’s also not. But it surely is also.
This Article First Appeared At jalopnik.com
