(Credits: Far Out / Paramount Pictures)
Wed 19 November 2025 20:15, UK
1993 wasn’t the greatest year of Jack Nicholson’s career, mostly because he didn’t appear in a single movie. Since he’s Jack Nicholson, though, he was nominated for an Academy Award at that year’s edition of the Oscars for one of the three pictures he’d been in the previous year.
His 1992 didn’t get off to a great start when Man Trouble was declared dead on arrival in July, with the blackly comedic romance tanking at the box office after failing to recoup even a quarter of its budget in ticket sales, and it also suffered the ignominy of becoming the worst-reviewed film of his entire career.
He rebounded five months later with his iconic and scenery-devouring turn in A Few Good Men, only for one of his most polarising efforts to release a couple of weeks later when he played the title character in Danny DeVito’s Hoffa, which earned him nominations from both the Golden Globes and the Razzies in his second flop in quick succession.
The three-time Oscar winner avoided the big screen for the following calendar year as a performer, but he kept his ear to the ground as an audience member. Truth be told, he didn’t care much for what he saw, despite 1993 being a stellar year that delivered several classics and one game-changing blockbuster.
It was the year of Steven Spielberg, with Jurassic Park kicking the doors off the hinges and ushering in the CGI revolution with the highest-grossing release of all time, while Schindler’s List deservedly snagged ‘Best Picture’, but those two titles were hardly the only movies of merit to arrive between January and December, even if Nicholson saw things very differently.
The Fugitive, Mrs Doubtfire, Indecent Proposal, True Romance, The Firm, Sleepless in Seattle, Philadelphia, The Piano, The Remains of the Day, In the Line of Fire, In the Name of the Father, The Age of Innocence, The Wedding Banquet, Groundhog Day, The Crying Game, El Mariachi, This Boy’s Life, and The Nightmare Before Christmas were just some of the memorable movies, but Nicholson didn’t care about any of them.
“The machine took over,” he lamented to Deseret. “In a year when Fearless is the most adventurous movie we made, I love the movie, don’t get me wrong, and I liked Searching for Bobby Fischer, but that’s it for movies taking chances. It’s not just the imagery. It’s the sensibility and the writing that get so pressured in one way. We’ve almost become self-censoring. Anything idiosyncratic inside the writing, we tend to plane it off, rather than risk going for it, which is what I’m mainly interested in.”
As far as he was concerned, there was nothing worthwhile to come out of the American industry in 1993 apart from Peter Weir’s Jeff Bridges-led drama and writer and director Steven Zaillian’s feature-length debut, detailing the titular chess prodigy. They’re both great films, but the only ones worth recommending from the entire 12-month period? That’s a hot take.
Nicholson is entitled to his opinion, but with the greatest of respect, there was much more on offer than that.
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