This $27M Ed Harris Movie Sank a Studio That Backed Star Wars

Backed by Warner Bros. and run by Alan Ladd Jr.—the same guy who greenlit Star Wars when no one else at 20th Century Fox believed in it—the company had a hot start. It produced Chariots of Fire (Best Picture, surprise hit) and Body Heat (sleeper hit), and it looked like Laddie was building a mini-studio on auteur ambition and actual taste.

Then came The Right Stuff.

Directed by Philip Kaufman and released in 1983, the film was a sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about America's first astronauts. The cast was stacked with names like Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Sam Shepard, Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid, Jeff Goldblum, and Barbara Hershey—but none of them were box office draws at the time. It was gorgeously made, ambitious, and critically beloved.

Audiences didn't care.

Here's what the numbers looked like:

• Production budget: $27 million
• Domestic gross: $21 million
• Runtime: 192 minutes (which did not help)
• Aftermath: It destroyed The Ladd Company

To be clear, this was their second financial disaster in a row. The year before, they released Blade Runner—a film that would go on to become one of the most influential sci-fi movies ever made, but in 1982, it was a marketing headache. Warner Bros. split the bill on that one with other companies, so Laddie didn't take the full hit.

But The Right Stuff? That was all theirs. It crashed so hard that even the surprise mega-success of Police Academy in 1984 (which made $150 million on a $5 million budget) couldn't save the studio. Warner Bros. pulled the plug.

It wasn't the end of Alan Ladd Jr.—he made a comeback in the '90s with hits like Braveheart and The Brady Bunch Movie—but The Right Stuff was the hill The Ladd Company died on. And the irony? It's now considered a classic.

So if you're keeping track, that's two artistic triumphs (Blade Runner and The Right Stuff) in two years... and two financial disasters. A brutal reminder that Hollywood doesn't run on respect—it runs on returns.