Are movie audiences falling out of love with Tom Hanks?
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As the golden boy of Nineties and Noughties cinema, Tom Hanks once seemed incapable of making a bad film. These days, the actor is less of a sure thing. He’s still got the acting chops, so what’s going on, asks Annabel Nugent – and where does he go from here?.
![[Tom Hanks does continue to turn in the occasional slam-dunk, but nothing that compares to the string of hits that defined his Nineties and Noughties]](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2020/01/28/12/tom-hanks-composite.jpg)
Here should have been a hit. The film reunites Tom Hanks with Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis and writer Eric Roth for the first time since Forrest Gump. It is, for all intents and purposes, a spiritual successor to the much-loved mega hit, which fans have been begging for a sequel to since 1994.
![[The hit that wasn’t to be: Robin Wright and Tom Hanks de-aged in the box-office flop ‘Here’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/14/14/newFile-1.jpg)
And yet the studio has been unable to translate any of that reunion buzz into box-office success – or even word-of-mouth success. Released in the US back in November, Here fizzled, floundered and then flopped. Recouping just 10 per cent of its $50m (£41m) budget, it is now, months later, being released in the UK without so much as a whisper.
How things have changed. Some 20 years ago, the name Tom Hanks translated directly into dollar signs. His involvement in something would have ignited a frenzy – now, it doesn’t seem to generate so much as a jostle. Which poses the question: are audiences switching off from America’s most-loved everyman?.
From the late Eighties to the Noughties, Hanks was ubiquitous. In the early days, he exuded boyish charm: he was completely delightful and believable as a 13-year-old in a grown-up body in Big, without a thimbleful of malice in his 6ft frame. He parlayed that into leading-man gravitas, genuine movie-star power in films like Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
