The one movie Kurt Russell knew was destined for cult classic status: “He was right”

Posted On April 29, 2025April 29, 2025

If there’s one actor in Hollywood who truly understands what a “cult classic” is, it’s Kurt Russell. He’s built a career on starring in genre films that may not have been hits at the box office but have stayed alive in the hearts of fans for decades. That’s why his opinion carried serious weight for a young director in the late ’90s. When Russell told him that his latest film, despite flopping commercially, was destined to become a cult classic, it meant everything.

Over the years, Russell’s career has always been unique among his Hollywood peers. His CV is littered with beloved movies from his 1980s and ’90s heyday that people still talk about today, write gushing tributes to online, and endlessly quote stretches of dialogue from. These films guaranteed Russell would enjoy Godlike status at every Comic-Con across the globe for the rest of his life, and a fresh round of royalties every time a new edition of each movie was released on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K.

Escape From New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Overboard, and Breakdown are all quintessential Russell genre flicks that weren’t particularly successful upon release, but cemented him as everyone’s favourite undervalued star of the era. Hell, even the Russell movies of this period that performed well at the box office – Stargate, Tango & Cash, Executive Decision, Backdraft – aren’t usually held up as true classics of their decade, yet true Russell-heads will gush about them just as much as any bona fide titan of the era. In truth, only Tombstone was universally loved by critics and audiences, but even it is listed as a “cult classic” on its Wikipedia page.

Amusingly, Russell became so cognisant of his propensity for making cult classics that some of his movies were granted the label before they were even released. In the buildup to the release of the gruesome western horror Bone Tomahawk in 2015, Russell chuckled to Empire, “They said it was destined to be a cult classic. Now, with some of the movies I make, they say it up front!” The star’s theory about why so many of his films qualify for this particular niche is that “they were misunderstood, or they were just so different that they didn’t follow the norm.”

In light of all this, it feels like Russell hooked up with the perfect director when he signed up to star in 1998’s sci-fi actioner Soldier. It was helmed by Paul WS Anderson, who later became most famous for the Resident Evil franchise, as well as the likes of Alien vs Predator, Mortal Kombat, and Death Race.

However, the year before Soldier, he made what many consider his magnum opus: Event Horizon, a truly grisly sci-fi horror movie about a crew of unfortunate astronauts confronted with a literal gateway to Hell. The film only made $42million on a budget of $60m when it was released. Still, over the next three decades, its reputation grew considerably, with its cult following only seeming to increase with every passing year.

Naturally, though, when Russell was first shown the film by Anderson, the ‘cult classic whisperer’ immediately clocked that Event Horizon was destined for a similar path in life. In 2022, Anderson told Variety that Russell assured him, “Paul, in 20 years time, that’s the movie you’re going to be really glad you made.”

The English filmmaker smiled, “He was right! I thought it was very generous of Kurt, considering I was about to go make a movie with him. The film was striking. It didn’t pull its punches, and it was true to what it wanted to do. We didn’t have a huge amount of time to cut trailers, do posters, and do a very elaborate campaign, but over time, people found the movie. It’s been a wonderful experience to see the audience for it grow.”

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