No more Mr Nice Guy: Tom Hanks blows up at movie critics
Tom Hanks has taken aim at movie critics in a heated on Conan O'Brien's podcast, calling out the entire review section of the entertainment industry.
The Hollywood actor launched into his tirade on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast as he looked at how movie reviews and the general audience reception to films has changed over the years.
“Now what happened is that time has become one of the metrics for how these things matter, right?” he said.
“In the day it was just a fist fight. It was every movie you came out, are you going to make the playoffs or not? Guess what? No, kid, you’re 2 and 12 and you ain’t going nowhere. Or, you got a shot.”
“It used to be you had these Rubicons that you crossed,” he continued. “First of all, do you love it or not? That’s the first thing. Yes, okay, you have crossed the Rubicon, right? The next Rubicon you cross is when the movie is completely done a year and a half later, and you see it for the first time, and you might like it. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, you look at it and say, ‘Hey, I think we acquitted ourselves pretty good.’ That’s Rubicon No. 2.”
Hanks went on, “Then the critics weigh in, that’s Rubicon No. 3, and that’s always up down. ‘We hate it, we like it. This is the worst thing … Oh hey, oh hi Tom, I saw you in a movie. It was cute.’”
“That’s when you ask the wife, ‘Hey, honey, could you take the revolver out of the glove box and hide it somewhere, because I think…,” Hanks joked.
Podcast host O'Brien then brought up that Hanks was initially “disappointed” with his 1996 film That Thing You Do!, which marked his directorial debut, but the movie has since become a cult classic in pop culture.
“Let me tell you something about these c***suckers who write about movies,” Hanks responded, before asking O’Brien and his co-hosts, “Can I say that?”
“Somebody who wrote about it is, ‘Tom Hanks has to stop hanging around with veterans of TV, because this is just like the shot on TV and it’s not much of anything,’” Hanks recalled. “That same person then wrote about the cult classic That Thing You Do! Same exact person. They said, ‘All you need is 20 years between now and then, and it ends up speaking some words.’”
Image credits: Shutterstock