(Credits: Far Out / Fox Searchlight Pictures )
Fri 31 October 2025 23:30, UK
As things stand, Avengers: Endgame is the last movie that Robert Redford made to be released for a wide audience, which isn’t a decent way for a legend to bow out, all things considered.
Sure, it’s only a minor cameo in a superhero blockbuster, but since the 22nd entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe earned $2.8 billion at the box office, more people have seen it in cinemas than any other picture the ‘New Hollywood’ icon had ever been a part of. It’s not reflective of his career, but it did bring in a ridiculous amount of eyeballs.
However, that wasn’t his final feature-length role. Redford quietly lent his voice to an experimental and altogether odd-sounding anthology flick that roped in a cavalcade of actors and filmmakers, including Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s Academy Award-winning collective, Daniels, Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard, and the late Power Rangers actor, Jason David Frank.
Redford, naturally, played Lokia The Dolphin Monster in Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia, the journey of Lay’n Pipe, a 47-foot-long boat, from its construction through to the end of human civilisation in a loosely-connected series of vignettes where the directors were encouraged to bring as much creative freedom to the table as they wanted, resulting in an absurdist fever dream that was only screened for a select few.
Where did it premiere? At the 2020 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, of course. As far as anyone knows, that’s the only time it’s ever been shown to the public, and over half a decade later, there’s still no sign of Omniboat being dragged out of the vault, dusted off, and made available. Wolfhard was in it, and even he didn’t have a clue what was going on.
“Literally, no. I don’t know what happened with that movie,” he told Slash Film several years later. “That’ll be good lost media. I think I saw the short I was in, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole movie. I heard it’s a crazy movie and had all these different filmmakers, obviously. I’m sure one day it’ll come out.”
It remains under lock and key, meaning the last movie that ever starred Robert Redford could become lost to the sands of time. He was supposed to bow out after David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun, and admitted he shouldn’t have said he was retiring, before the lure of an Avengers sequel proved too strong to resist, apparently. Either that, or he was offered a shitload of money for his time and effort.
That said, the near-mythical Omniboat wasn’t the final performance of his career, with Redford making an uncredited appearance in the third season premiere of Dark Winds, which marked a full-circle moment in an odyssey that had started when he first purchased the rights to author Tony Hillerman’s novels in the 1980s.
Until the day that Omniboat is finally released does or doesn’t come, the unfortunate fact is that, for the time being and possibly the foreseeable future, Redford’s cinematic swansong won’t be seen by anyone.
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