Don’t come for Tom Hanks’ movies.
The Oscar winner, 68, appeared on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast on Sunday and called movie critics “c–ksuckers,” while explaining how the responses to films in Hollywood have evolved over the years.
“Now what happened is that time has become one of the metrics for how these things matter, right?” he said. “In the day it was just a fist fight. It was every movie you came out, are you going to make the playoffs or not? Guess what? No, kid, you’re 2 and 12 and you ain’t going nowhere. Or, you got a shot.”
“It used to be you had these Rubicons that you crossed,” he continued. “First of all, do you love it or not? That’s the first thing. Yes, okay, you have crossed the Rubicon, right? The next Rubicon you cross is when the movie is completely done a year and a half later, and you see it for the first time, and you might like it. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, you look at it and say, ‘Hey, I think we acquitted ourselves pretty good.’ That’s Rubicon No. 2.”
Hanks went on, “Then the critics weigh in, that’s Rubicon No. 3, and that’s always up down. ‘We hate it, we like it. This is the worst thing… Oh hey, oh hi Tom, I saw you in a movie. It was cute.’”
“That’s when you ask the wife, ‘Hey, honey, could you take the revolver out of the glove box and hide it somewhere, because I think…,” Hanks joked.
The “Toy Story” star then noted that how a film performs at the box office is also important to its critical legacy.
“Then a ton of time goes by when none of that stuff matters anymore,” he added, “and the movie just exists exactly as it is outside of loser winner status. Thumbs up, thumbs down. And that’s when this stuff comes around, where it’s like that this thing that didn’t work back then, kind of does work now, or just the opposite, a thing that was huge back then is a museum piece and doesn’t really speak to anything.”
O’Brien, 61, brought up that Hanks was initially “disappointed” with his 1996 film “That Thing You Do!”, which marked his directorial debut, but the movie has since become a cult classic in pop culture.
“Let me tell you something about these c–suckers who write about movies,” Hanks responded, before asking O’Brien and his co-hosts, “Can I say that?”
“Somebody who wrote about it is, ‘Tom Hanks has to stop hanging around with veterans of TV, because this is just like the shot on TV and it’s not much of anything,’” Hanks recalled. “That same person then wrote about the cult classic ‘That Thing You Do!’ Same exact person. They said, ‘All you need is 20 years between now and then, and it ends up speaking some words.’”
“But that’s the thing we all signed up for,” the veteran actor noted. “That’s the carnival, that’s the contest. I got faith in that. That’s okay.”
Hanks’ most famous movies, in addition to those aforementioned, include “A League of Their Own,” “Philadelphia,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Apollo 13,” Catch Me If You Can,” “Bridge of Spies,” “Sully” and “Elvis.”
He’s a six-time Oscar nominee, with two Best Actor wins for his roles in “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.”
In 2023, Hanks addressed if he’ll ever retire from acting, telling Variety he has “no desire” to end his career just yet.
“I’m not working for the sake of working. I’m in a very lucky position. It’s got to be fabulous,” he said. “Rita [Wilson] and I talk about it all the time, which is there’s only two reasons go to work: It’ll be good or it’ll be fun.”
“And if it’s neither one of those, I’ll stay home until the cows come on,” he added. “I don’t need to do anything.”
