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October 27th, 2026 · 8:45pm GMT
Even though he’s one of the highest-grossing directors of all time, it took Ron Howard a while to get into the blockbuster business, and even then, eye-watering budgets were the exception, not the rule.
Unless something dramatic changes, which feels unlikely because he can’t seem to buy himself a hit these days, Solo: A Star Wars Story will take some beating as the most expensive movie of Howard’s career, with the firing of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller causing the budget to balloon to an estimated $300 million.
The two-time Academy Award winner didn’t helm his first nine-figure flick until How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which was his 14th feature, and since then, only the first two instalments in the Da Vinci Code trilogy, In the Heart of the Sea, and his Star Wars spinoff have followed suit, and half of them flopped.
It’s not that he can’t be trusted with those kinds of numbers; it’s that they don’t seem particularly well-suited to his skill set. What that skill set is, exactly, nobody can be sure, seeing as there’s no such thing as a Ron Howard-style film because Ron Howard has no identifiable style, which are his words, not ours.
By 1993, he’d made his bones as a safe pair of hands who could helm a picture in any genre and deliver a serviceable end result and a decent profit at the box office, but he’d never made anything that exceeded a $60 million budget. He was planning on it, though, but he was ultimately kicked to the kerb.
In December, Variety noted that the Happy Days alum was attached to adapt David Brin’s novel, The Postman, for the big screen, with Eric Roth tasked to write the screenplay, Wendy Finerman on producing duties, and Tom Hanks set for the lead role as the titular drifter who wanders a post-apocalyptic America.
When it comes to dodging bullets, they don’t come much deadlier than that. By 1995, Kevin Costner had his fancy tickled by the high-concept story, and when he came aboard to star, he dispensed with Howard, Finerman, and Roth, set Brian Helgeland to rewrite the script, installed himself as a producer alongside Jim Wilson and Steve Tisch, and decided to pull double duty by directing and starring.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything, as it turned out. Whereas Costner’s first tilt behind the camera won seven Academy Awards, including two for him, and became the top-earning title in the history of an entire genre, The Postman was a catastrophic bomb that completely annihilated his mainstream career.
It was universally panned, lost upwards of $70 million, and won all five of the Razzies it was nominated for, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Actor’. Would that have happened had Howard and Hanks been the ones to make it? Nobody will ever know, but they’ll be more glad than most that they never had to find out.
