(Credits: Far Out / Harald Krichel)
Sun 26 October 2025 20:00, UK
Sometimes, actors know that the film they’ve signed on to star in is going to be a runaway success, but on other occasions, they have to take a knowing risk and assume that a slightly less commercial venture could be the one that garners them attention. For Bill Murray in the late 1990s, he had found himself in the latter camp for the first time in over a decade.
Having starred as Peter Venkman in two massively successful Ghostbusters films, and also impressed with turns in other comedies such as Caddyshack and Groundhog Day, the 1980s and early ‘90s were a fruitful period for the actor, and it appeared that he could do no wrong, especially if appearing in films of this genre.
However, the latter half of the decade proved to throw a few obstacles in his way, and while his work in films during this period experienced a few forms of decline in quality, the films he was starring in also weren’t successful, and were largely ignored by both the public and by critics. Sometimes, it’s hard to avoid a dry spell, but understandably, it was something that frustrated Murray, and he wasn’t entirely sure what else he could do to revitalise his career.
Larger Than Life was a comprehensive failure, unable to meet the same box office figures as other family-oriented films that came out around the same time, with Jingle All the Way and Space Jam, which Murray had a cameo in, both stopped his lighthearted comedy alongside an elephant from having any success. After this, his next film, The Man Who Knew Too Little, a spy parody based on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, also bombed at the box office, and while it wasn’t panned like Larger Than Life, it still didn’t provide Murray with the lift he needed.
Murray would try to justify his drought during an interview with Foreign Press. “I realised, after movies like Ghostbusters, that I shouldn’t give up even if the movie didn’t have a ride at Disney World. I realised I don’t need a blockbuster audience,” he argued. While this may have been true, it didn’t explain why the films he was appearing in were so lacklustre.
He continued by trying to defend both Larger Than Life and The Man Who Knew Too Little, claiming that there were no issues with either of the films he’d starred in. “Those movies had good premises,” he argued. “I’ve had a lot of good premises, and at a certain point, I went, ‘Jesus, one of these films has to hit.’ But either way, I’m too far in. I can’t give up now just to chase money.”
This 1999 interview came during a press conference to promote Rushmore, the film he’d just worked on for Wes Anderson, and while this wasn’t necessarily a smash hit, it garnered a cult following and saw him develop a close working relationship with the director, going on to appear in multiple of his films throughout the subsequent years. Not only that, but his appearance in Lost in Translation in 2003 would add to the resurgence of Murray, and even though he may think differently about this late ‘90s blip, it’s clear that the quality of the films he was starring in were becoming significantly greater, and it helped get his career back on track.
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