Bruce Willis Survived Back-To-Back Bombs That Lost Close To $50 Million At The Height Of His Career

The great Bruce Willis is one of the biggest movie stars of my lifetime. It’s crazy to think that he could have had his whole legendary career derailed by two movies that came out in the early ‘90s, The Bonfire of the Vanities and Hudson Hawk. The estimated losses at the box office for both movies combined are somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million, which is crazy to think about in 1990 dollars. To put it in perspective, that’s somewhere around $130 million today. Here’s what happened.

Willis Had Jumped From TV To Movies Successfully

Back in the ‘80s, it was far less common for stars to jump back and forth between TV and movies than it is today in this age of prestige television. Once an actor got a rep for being “a TV star,” it was often difficult to shake that. Willis first found fame on the small screen in the hit show Moonlighting, but after Blind Date in 1987, and especially after Die Hard in 1987, Willis was a bona fide movie star. He followed those up with hits like Look Who's Talking and Die Hard 2.

Then came The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma. Bonfire is a book-to-screen adaptation based on the excellent best-selling novel by Tom Wolfe of the same name. The movie, which co-stars Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman and Kim Cattrall, was a box office disaster. It was panned by critics, and audiences didn’t think much of it either. I actually remember when it came out, as I had loved the book, and I didn’t think much of the movie, either. The cost overruns on the production are legendary, including, maybe most infamously, what amounted to about a 10-second scene of an Air France Concorde landing that cost nearly $100,000.

All the pieces were there: a great director, an A-list cast, a best-selling book from a big-name author… and yet it totally flopped. Tom Hanks bounced back with A League of Their Own a couple of years later, Morgan Freeman returned a year later with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and then Unforgiven in 1992. Willis came back with Hudson Hawk.

Hudson Hawk Is A Bizarre Movie

If you’ve never seen Hudson Hawk, I wouldn’t be surprised. Not many people saw it in 1991 when it came out, and it certainly hasn’t become a cult classic in the decades since. It’s a comedy, but it doesn’t know what kind of comedy it’s trying to be. It’s slapstick… and surrealist… and dark at times. It has a musical number that Willis and co-star Danny Aiello sing together… It’s really, really, really weird, and not in a cool way.

Like Bonfire, Hudson Hawk was a huge bomb at the box office. Once again, critics hated it, as did audiences. For any normal actor, back-to-back bombs like this would spell certain career doom, but Willis isn’t normal. He’s just too good. He finally got things back on track with The Last Boy Scout in 1991 before tearing it up in the latter half of the ‘90s with Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element and Armageddon, before finishing out the decade with The Sixth Sense.

Bruce Willis’ career lasted a remarkable four and a half decades before he retired in 2023 after being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. To think, it almost all came crashing down before some of his most iconic movies.