The Studio That Rejected ‘Walk the Line’ Spent Way More on ‘Walk Hard’

The trailer just dropped for A Complete Unknown, Hollywood’s latest attempt to turn your parents’ record collection into box-office gold. The upcoming film stars Timothée Chalamet as the legendary Bob Dylan, chronicling the young troubadour’s early years as he bums around the ‘60s New York folk circuit and (spoiler alert?) eventually freaks everybody out by playing an electric guitar. 

Pfft, call us when there’s a movie about the making of Dylan’s Christmas album.

A Complete Unknown marks a return to the music biopic genre for director James Mangold, who previously helmed the Oscar-winning Walk the Line, which starred Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash and Robert Patrick as the T-1000, after he killed Johnny Cash’s father and took his place. 

While Walk the Line was a critical and financial success, it was also painfully formulaic. And its structural triteness was absolutely bodied two years later by Jake Kasdan’s parody film Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story, featuring John C. Reilly as the titular legendary singer-songwriter who has to think about his entire life before he plays.

To his credit, Mangold claimed in interviews that he had no beef with the makers of Walk Hard, and, as he told Rolling Stone, he actually thought it was “really funny.” He also rejected the idea that the music biopic would need to be rethought in a post-Walk Hard world. “I think that you could say the same thing about the Western and Blazing Saddles,” Mangold argued. 

But he was still miffed that the movie was made at all, specifically because the studio behind Walk Hard, Sony, had previously declined the opportunity to make Walk the Line, which would have been way cheaper to produce. “What always killed me about Walk Hard is that they made it for twice as much money as we made Walk The Line,” Mangold recalled, “and for the studio that passed on Walk The Line! ‘Wow, that’s interesting. You guys wouldn’t spend $24 million making the Johnny Cash story, but you’ll spend $50 million making fun of it two years later?’ I could never quite figure it out.”

To be fair, Mangold’s numbers seem to be a tad off, because Walk Hard reportedly only cost $35 million to make, which is still more than Walk the Line, but it arguably crammed a whole lot more production value into its running time. I mean, Dewey Cox travels to India, flips cars while wearing a thong, and, last time I checked, Walk the Line didn’t contain a single monkey. 

Of course, Walk the Line ended up raking in over $186 million worldwide, while Walk Hard didn’t even break even, earning just $20 million at the box office. But it’s since accrued a loyal cult following and is straight-up just a better movie.

I mean, do we really need another Bob Dylan biopic when we already have this?

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