Wolfgang Petersen. THR.
In America, Petersen was all about action. He made eight films in the U.S. and enjoyed a string of five straight box office hits: the political thriller In the Line of Fire (1993), starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent; Outbreak; Air Force One (1997), starring Harrison Ford as the U.S. president; The Perfect Storm (2000), with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as ill-fated seamen; and the epic Troy (2004), starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.
Was “Troy” really a “hit”? Wikipedia says:
Troy grossed $133.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $364 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $497.4 million, making the film one of the highest grossing films of 2004, alongside The Passion of the Christ, Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2.
But it cost $185 million to make. If you use the rule of thumb of three times budget to make a profit, “Troy” falls short. Using the 2.5X rule, it may have made a relatively small profit. And do you hear anybody talking about “Troy” these days?
I don’t have a dog in this fight: I haven’t seen “Troy”, but would not mind seeing it. The only Peterson film I have seen is “Das Boot”, but I’d actually like to see almost all of his others…
…except “Poseidon”, which I think everyone agrees was a bad idea that pretty much killed his career. (He has one credit in IMDB as a director and producer after that, and that was a German film in 2016. Which, to be honest, does sound good.)