How John Travolta went from $20 million to £128 a film

Telegraph

5 hours ago

If you had been one of the millions of cinemagoers who watched Look Who's Talking in 1989, you would have hardly have predicted that it was a cursed film. Yet now, three and a half decades later, unfortunate fates have befallen its three lead actors. Kirstie Alley died in 2022, after a series of personal and professional disasters.
Bruce Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia around the same time and retired from acting, leaving his lasting legacy as the films he made in his heyday, rather than the immediately forgotten low-budget B-movies he specialised in for the last years of his career. And as for John Travolta? Well, he's still working, and still making pictures. Except, for his own dignity, it might be time that he stopped doing so.
If you have not seen the 71-year-old Travolta's latest film High Rollers, then don't worry, nobody else has either. It has received the most nominal of theatrical releases imaginable in the UK, and may well have made about the same kind of money that 2023's Mob Land grossed when it came out: an unimpressive $171 (approximately £128) from three screens. It is the kind of quickie that the actor has been specialising in for years, to negligible artistic or financial impact.
In fact, it is the swiftly made sequel to another film, 2024's Cash Out, which stars him as the same character, mastermind professional thief Mason Goddard. However this one does, a third picture in this series has already been filmed, between March and April this year, and will probably be released early in 2026, if not before.
In 2018, one of this newspaper's writers, reflecting on Travolta's apparently moribund career, reflected that 'He's a relic of a different time, and struggling to find his place in a world that has evolved far beyond him.' This has been the case for many actors who once bestrode the heights of Hollywood like colossuses but have now been reduced to appearing in the most derivative and poorly made pap imaginable. (The lack of quality inherent in Cash Out and High Rollers might be best expressed by its director Randall Emmett, to whom we shall return, working under the pseudonym 'Ives', as if in shame. Don't worry, Mr Emmett, you will not be forgotten.)
It is generally a given that the star system has collapsed (Tom Cruise and, if F1 does the business, Brad Pitt aside). A-list actors who once commanded $20 million (approximately £14.9 million) a picture without blinking (as Travolta once did) have either had to endlessly reprise their best-known roles (hello, Harrison Ford), quietly retired from cinema (we're looking at you, Mr Nicholson) or have continued to work in ever-worsening projects.
Still, even by these miserable standards, Travolta seems to have thrown himself in at the shallow end with gusto. One of the many low points came when he played the mobster John Gotti in a curiously indulgent biopic that portrayed a mass-murdering gangster as a charming, essentially decent family man, to critical and audience disbelief alike.
It is one of the relatively few mainstream pictures to have an uncoveted 0 per cent rating on the reviews aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, meaning it has not received a single positive review.
Only slightly better received was the Fred Durst directed and co-written stalker drama The Fanatic, in which Travolta played an autistic man obsessed by his favourite film star. As one of the most famous figures in Hollywood, you might have expected the actor to bring an unusual degree of empathy and knowledge to the role. But as the New York Times remarked of The Fanatic, it 'delineates the border that separates the merely stale from the genuinely rancid'.
Since 2018, he has made eight films including Gotti and The Fanatic, and one curious short offering, The Shepherd, based on a novella by the late Frederick Forsyth, and in which he fleetingly appears as the eponymous shepherd, a ghostly WWII pilot guiding other airmen to safety. Still, the Iain Softley-directed, Alfonso Cuarón-produced mini-feature is infinitely more watchable than just about anything else that he has appeared in over the same period, harnessing what remains of his movie-star charisma to diverting effect.
Otherwise, his pictures are more of the same; braindead action and crime films that manage to rope Travolta in alongside other actors, who are paid a lot of money for a few days' work and to put their name above the title. These have included Willis, who cannot be blamed for putting together a retirement fund, Morgan Freeman and even Robert de Niro, whose appearance in the 2013 thriller Killing Season (opposite Travolta, naturally) may have represented a nadir in the career of the man who once appeared in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
But since then, de Niro has gone on to reunite with Scorsese and be Oscar-nominated, as well as to be charmless and monosyllabic in interviews. His co-star, by way of contrast, continues his inexorable decline into mediocrity. You'd call him the Doug McClure of contemporary cinema, but at least McClure was having fun in his B-movies like Warlords of Atlantis and At The Earth's Core. Travolta, meanwhile, is stuck far beneath the earth's core, in endless, awful dross that represents a kind of cinematic hell.
The man responsible for keeping him in this eternal bondage is Emmett, whose company Emmett/Furla Oasis Films has become synonymous with a bait 'n' switch technique known as the 'geezer teaser'. The idea is that audiences are lured into watching a picture with a well-known lead, usually a Willis or Travolta, but these actors have only been hired to work for a couple of days, and are on screen for a matter of a few scenes and 10 minutes or so. (One obvious giveaway – in higher-budget films, too – is that the actor appears on the same set for all their scenes, in only slightly different costumes.)
While Emmett, aka 'the Tasmanian devil', as his business partner once called him, has been involved with some artistically respectable pictures (including Scorsese's Silence), most of his output is poorly made rot that has negligible appeal to anyone apart from the terminally bored or the pathologically undemanding.
As for the A-list actors paid huge amounts to appear in his terrible pictures, Al Pacino, who earned $6 million (approximately £4.4 million) for 19 days of work on American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally, cheerily set out his own estimation of Emmett when he sent him an email – which subsequently leaked. 'Let's do this Randall. I'm not going for the A's or the B's,' Pacino wrote. 'I'm going for something between C and B. I don't like Ds.'
Still, Pacino is a bona fide cinematic legend, whereas Travolta these days is an increasingly pitiable figure. His Nineties heyday of Pulp Fiction and Face/Off is long since gone, and the last cinematic release of any note that he appeared in was Oliver Stone's modestly successful 2012 picture Savages, in which he had a supporting role as a corrupt DEA agent. He has had occasional flurries of visibility since then, admittedly.
There was a major appearance in 2016's The People vs OJ Simpson as the attorney Robert Shapiro, for which he was Emmy and Golden Globe nominated. At his best, Travolta was always better playing an anti-hero, or an outright villain, than he ever was a good guy. In most of his most memorable roles, there's something off-the-leash about him, and as Shapiro, his line readings and over-the-top theatrics gave him his most enjoyable part since 2001's Swordfish.
Few would dispute Travolta's acting ability, more his choice in projects, which presumably stems from a lavish lifestyle that includes his own Boeing 737, parked outside his capacious Florida mansion. But after a while, there is only so much money one man can need. Appearing in Cash In – sorry, Cash Out – is not going to make any existential difference.
In 1978, after his first flurry of success with Grease and Saturday Night Live, Rolling Stone was sufficiently confident in the future career of the young Travolta to declare that 'He will be revered forever, in the manner of Elvis, James Dean, [and] Marilyn Monroe.' Had Travolta retired from cinema in, say, 1999, this reputation would still be intact. But he made the catastrophic decision to celebrate his Scientology faith with the all-time-disaster Battlefield Earth in 2000, which did nothing for his credibility and turned him into a laughing stock.
In retrospect, it seems incredible that he was still able to play leading roles in mainstream pictures like Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 and Hairspray. The unlovely legacy of Battlefield Earth – recently voted the worst picture ever made by IMDB users – still hangs over him to this day.
It is also true that the actor has suffered some significant personal losses; his son Jett died in 2009 and his wife, the actress Kelly Preston, died of breast cancer in 2020. Most would feel sympathy for him if he chose either to step away from film altogether or to concentrate on taking small, interesting roles with talented directors. It is easy to imagine Paul Thomas Anderson or Christopher Nolan offering Travolta a career-resurrecting role, albeit one in which his considerable vanity might be stripped away from him.
Instead, his next part in a film anyone might have any interest in seeing is in the musical romantic comedy That's Amore, in which Travolta stars opposite Katherine Heigl – 25 years his junior – as a lifelong bachelor who meets and falls in love with a troubled woman. It has been described as 'a present-day Marty', and has some potential, especially if Travolta and Heigl make for a convincing on-screen duo.
Yet even here there are difficulties. The film, which is written and directed by the Oscar-winning Green Book screenwriter Nick Vallelonga, was shot in late 2022, and is still awaiting a release date. It was not helped by 2023 legal shenanigans that saw dozens of crew members sue for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. Until such things are settled, Travolta's potential chance of a comeback is sitting on a shelf somewhere.
At least there's always the possibility of self-parody. In December 2023, he appeared in a Capital One advert that managed to imagine what Saturday Night Fever's Tony Manero would be doing if he turned into Santa, and it had more wit and charm in its brief span than in any film he's made that runs a hundred times the length.
The actor seldom gives interviews these days – less out of unreachability and more because he has little noteworthy to promote – and his Instagram account is mainly devoted to pictures of his family, including his daughter, the actress and singer Ella Bleu. There have been occasional complaints of unsavoury behaviour, but any court cases brought against him have been consistently dismissed. Although his public eccentricities – referring to singer Idina Menzel as ' Adele Dazeem ' during the Oscars, for instance, and planting an enthusiastic kiss on a stone-faced Scarlett Johansson – are well known, they are the stuff of hilarity, rather than cancellation.
Still, he keeps himself busy, after a fashion, when he isn't spending a few weeks at a time making appalling films. He was seen at the Paris Olympics with Ella last year, where – naturally – he flew himself in on his private jet, and later uploaded a brief 'what I did on my holidays' montage to his Instagram account. He has befriended the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for reasons best known to himself. In his first wilderness period in the Eighties, Travolta famously danced with Princess Diana at the White House in 1985, so there is at least precedent of sorts for this association. (Although it remains to be seen whether Harry and Meghan ever find themselves taking up the Scientology that Travolta is said still to practice.) Celebrity gossip has linked him with Sex and the City actress Kristin Davis.
Some may not care what Travolta does next, and certainly, he has exhausted the patience of all but his most loyal admirers. But Hollywood loves a comeback, and the actor's return in 1994 with Pulp Fiction was one of the most spectacular in Hollywood.
Tarantino remains consistent in his admiration for Travolta as an actor, praising his performance in Brian de Palma's Hitchcockian thriller Blow Out a matter of a couple of months ago, and there have been rumours that the filmmaker is keen to cast his former Vincent Vega in whatever his final film turns out to be. Whether he can manage to rise from direct-to-streaming death for a second time, courtesy of Tarantino or another A-lister, or whether he's stuck in the Randall Emmett closet for all eternity remains to be seen.