Bruce Willis Once Called the 1 Movie He Did With Tom Hanks ‘Dead Before It Ever Got out the Box’

Actors Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis have contributed their star power to many films in their long careers. But there was one movie they both agreed they shouldn’t have been cast in.

Bruce Willis co-starred with Tom Hanks on ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’

Willis and Hanks once collaborated for the 1990 movie Bonfire of the Vanities. The movie was rounded out with a cast that also included Melanie Griffith and Morgan Freeman, and was based on Tom Wolfe’s best-selling novel. Despite its notable cast, and the success of its source material, the film didn’t replicate the same success as the book. It was panned by critics and bombed at the box-office.

Hanks, however, was in agreement with critics who blasted the film. When Oprah once asked him if he wished he hadn’t done Bonfire, the Philadelphia star didn’t mince words.

“Only because it’s one of the crappiest movies ever made,” he answered.

But Hanks also asserted that he learned something important shooting the movie.

“And yet if I hadn’t gone through that experience, I would have lost out on something valuable. That movie was a fascinating enterprise from the word go,” he continued. “It was bigger than life, and for some reason it had a huge amount of attention on it. I can go to Germany, even now, and people will say, ‘How come you don’t make good, gritty movies like The Bonfire of the Vanities anymore?’ They have no concept of what it meant to be an American and have that movie enter the national consciousness. Bonfire taught me that I couldn’t manufacture a core connection.”

Bruce Willis wouldn’t have done ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ if given another chance to do the movie

Hanks wasn’t the only actor who didn’t enjoy Bonfire. Willis also shared a similar opinion about the movie.

“The only movie I would not do again, given the opportunity, is Bonfire of the Vanities,” he once said in an interview with Playboy.

Although Willis didn’t appreciate how critics slammed the project, The Sixth Sense star conceded the film was in trouble upon even before its release.

“It was stillborn, dead before it ever got out of the box. It was another film that was reviewed before it hit the screen. The critical media didn’t want to see a movie that cast the literary world in a shady light,” Willis said.

He may not have liked critics blasting Bonfire. But Willis agreed that he and Hanks might not have been the right choices for the movie.

“But they were right. I was miscast. I know that Tom Hanks thinks he was, too. The movie was based on a great book. But one problem with the story, when it came to the film, was that there was no one in it you could root for. In most successful movies, there’s someone to cheer on,” he said.

How Bruce Willis felt about being criticized for ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’

Willis may have understood where critics were coming from regarding certain issues of the movie. But there were some critics he felt attacked both him and the movie due to an agenda.

One of the critics he singled out was journalist Julie Salamon. Salamon was invited on the set of Bonfire by the film’s director Brian De Palma. She would later release a book that discussed her time on the film called The Devil’s Candy. But the Die Hard veteran didn’t take kindly to some of Salamon’s criticism, especially when they questioned Willis’ acting ability.

“Brian De Palma chose to have this girl come on the set and write a book about the making of the film. But he neglected to tell the actors about it until she had already been skulking around for about four weeks. By the time we learned what she was doing, the damage was done. Basically, she decided to take a big s*** on a bunch of people she would never get to be in her own life,” he said.