Bruce Willis was on a bit of a heater heading into 2001. The star had a habit of keeping busy, which meant that there would be a dud or two mixed in with the successes, but after the washout of “Last Man Standing” in 1996 (and excluding the animated hit that was “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America”), he had four consecutive years with a box-office smash in “The Fifth Element” ($264 million worldwide), “Armageddon” ($554 million WW), “The Sixth Sense” ($673 million WW), and “Unbreakable” ($248 million WW). Why not make it five?
Willis surely didn’t lack for offers in 2001, but for whatever reason he rolled into that year with one film on the slate, Barry Levinson’s caper comedy “Bandits.” Co-starring Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett, it’s a funny enough movie that rode its mild charms to a $67 million global gross — which fell short of the movie’s inexplicably fat $75 million budget (money that most certainly is not on the screen).
This was the end of Willis’ heater, but it needn’t have been that way. Had he not turned down a very sweet offer to appear in a star-studded movie starring George Clooney and ten other movie stars, he would’ve kept that streak going into 2002.
Bruce Willis could’ve menaced George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven
In a 2007 Q&A hosted in the infamously raucous “talkbacks” of Ain’t It Cool News (where I got my start as a journalist, and served as the West Coast Editor from 2009 to 2015), Bruce Willis fielded questions from fans covering the breadth of his career to that point. One of these fans asked if he regretted turning down any movies, and after revealing that he opted out of the Patrick Swayze role in “Ghost” (opposite his wife Demi Moore, no less), he discussed the mistake that put a damper on his 2001. Per Willis:
“I wish I had played the role of Terry Benedict in [‘Ocean’s Eleven’]. I wanted to work with George Clooney, and thought I might only have one shot at doing it, and when I read the script, the Terry Benedict role in [‘Ocean’s Eleven’] wasn’t finished yet, so I passed on it. Another bad choice, but Andy Garcia did a great job with it, and the rest is history.”
Obviously, considering the run he was on, Willis didn’t need “Ocean’s Eleven.” But while he’s absolutely correct that Garcia was perfectly hissable as casino magnate Terry Benedict, it would’ve been a spicy contrast of movie star styles to see Clooney and Willis face off. I dearly wish we could’ve seen that.
Of course, Willis did get his opportunity to enter Clooney’s heist-happy orbit via a cameo as himself in “Ocean’s Twelve.” As for that heater, maybe shooting “Ocean’s Eleven” would’ve kept him from blowing his 2002 on the middling “Hart’s War” and the delayed-due-to-production-problems “Tears of the Sun.” But let’s not go second-guessing Bruce Willis. We were fortunate to have him in anything for as long as he was able to bless us with his screen presence.