Universal Hid Tobey Maguire’s Civil War Western in 11 Theaters

Ride with the Devil took in $635,096 against a $38 million budget after USA Films opened it in 11 theaters. Tobey Maguire’s Civil War western, directed by Ang Lee, never received the wide run Universal once planned.

Criterion later issued Lee’s longer cut as Spine 514. The film USA Films would not sell is the version the archive kept.

USA Films Parked a $38 Million Western in 11 Theaters

Thanksgiving weekend in 1999 belonged to Toy Story 2, which took in $57.3 million. Lee’s picture, a 138-minute R-rated story of Missouri bushwhackers, opened to $64,159 in 11 theaters and ranked 50th, with a $5,832 per-screen average. Some ledgers list 8 theaters, a $35 million budget, and a $630,779 cume; tracking data lists $38 million, 11 theaters, and $635,096, and that is the count used here.

Los Angeles had already opened it on November 24. The Friday frame still left the film with $87,767 to date, which is the math of a specialty dump, not a platform that intends to grow.

THE THANKSGIVING RUN

The one expansion, to 60 theaters in mid-December, raised the rank to 37 and still averaged $1,454 a screen. By early January the footprint was 25 theaters. Domestic take stayed at $635,096, with no international figure published, so the theatrical return sat under 2 percent of the production budget.

Fox, Damon and the Hand-Off to a Specialty Label

Good Machine had developed the film at Fox Searchlight, the same partnership behind Lee’s The Ice Storm. Searchlight put Ride with the Devil into turnaround a few weeks after Ice Storm opened, as the budget climbed and the one bankable name attached, Matt Damon, left for The Talented Mr. Ripley. Skeet Ulrich took the friend role opposite Maguire. Universal then majority-financed the shoot, and Good Machine International handled overseas sales.

Kansas hosted most of the filming, and at release it was the most expensive picture shot in the state. In post-production, Good Machine’s first-look deal at Fox was expiring. The Universal experience had been smooth enough that the companies launched a new first-look pact, a relationship that later ended with Universal buying Good Machine in 2002 and folding it into Focus Features.

None of that helped the release. Universal passed the finished film to USA Films, its specialty label. A Good Machine production for USA Films was dated for Thanksgiving and talked up as a possible awards film with a wide break still on the table. Jewel, then selling millions of records and coming off a Super Bowl anthem, was the famous face on the ads. The picture still opened in 11 theaters.

HOW THE PICTURE GOT PARKED

• Fox exit: Searchlight dropped the project after Ice Storm, citing cost as the $38 million budget came into view.
• Damon out: The only star who could have sold a wide date chose Ripley, and Ulrich stepped in.
• USA Films: Universal shifted domestic duties to its specialty arm instead of opening the film itself.
• Tests: Lee later said poor test screenings drove the decision, and he stopped offering his films for tests.
• January killed: A planned mid-January wide reissue was scrapped, and the DVD arrived on July 18, 2000.

Whitney Crothers Dilley, in The Cinema of Ang Lee, writes that the original poster promised embracing lovers over soldiers on horseback, a Far and Away pitch the movie does not keep. For a ticket buyer in 1999, that gap was the whole ad campaign.

Why Holt Made the Film Unsellable

James Schamus adapted Daniel Woodrell’s novel Woe to Live On. Maguire plays Jake Roedel, son of a German immigrant, who rides with Ulrich’s Jack Bull Chiles after Jayhawkers burn Jack’s family place. Jeffrey Wright plays Daniel Holt, a formerly enslaved man fighting with the Bushwhackers out of loyalty to George Clyde, the man who freed him, played by Simon Baker. Criterion’s own synopsis calls Holt an unusual ally “fighting for the South despite being a former slave.”

That is the commercial problem in one line. A Thanksgiving adult drama can survive mixed reviews. A Confederate guerrilla story whose most interesting character is a Black irregular, and whose white leads slowly lose the plot of vengeance, cannot be sold as Glory, Gettysburg, or a Jewel romance. Lee told interviewers he was well over 40 and did not know who Jewel was; he also said her part did not require her to carry the movie, so he did not see her as a large risk. Roger Ebert, who gave the film two stars and called it a long slog unless you were fascinated by the undercurrents, still wrote that Jewel was “an actress here, not a pop star trying out a new hobby.”

Aggregators logged a 69 from 29 reviews. It later sat at 65 percent from 68 notices. A newspaper review called it probably the most intelligent treatment of the period on film. A magazine review called it dramatically anemic. Those two verdicts can both be true of a 138-minute picture that spends long stretches on winter quarters, letters, and the boredom of irregular war, then detonates in the raid on Lawrence. Western obsessives still treat that raid as the passage the theatrical cut never got a chance to be famous for. They do not treat the movie as a lost Maguire star vehicle, because Jake Roedel is not a hero you put on a lunchbox.

Lee said of Jewel, “There’s something virginal about Jewel. There’s an authenticity to her performance because she’s being watched for the first time.” She had taken three months of acting lessons on his orders, practiced tai chi because a stalker and a famous director had her rattled, and then erased the rock-star manner on set, which Schamus said he rarely saw. Spirit had sold 3.7 million copies. None of that moved a ticket for a bushwhacker picture that opens by joking that marriage is a kind of slavery for a man.

Criterion Restored the Minutes Lee Had Cut

The theatrical cut runs 2 hours and 18 minutes. Lee had already been pulled toward Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the studio wanted the Civil War film shorter before it opened. A new assembly screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2009. On April 27, 2010, the Criterion Collection issued the reconstructed 148-minute director’s cut as Spine 514, supervised and approved by Lee and cinematographer Frederick Elmes, under license from Universal, which is uncommon for that catalog.

The extra minutes are not a stack of trims dumped back in. Viewers who compared the two cuts have pointed to a scene around a former bushwhacker who has lost a leg, and to a longer Lawrence massacre. The disc carries commentaries from Lee and Schamus and from Elmes, sound designer Drew Kunin, and production designer Mark Friedberg, plus a new interview with Wright and booklet essays by Godfrey Cheshire and Edward E. Leslie, who wrote The Devil Knows How to Ride on William Clarke Quantrill. Cheshire’s essay frames the film as a rumination on identity and loyalty in America’s bloodiest war, which is language a 1999 one-sheet could not print over a Jewel clinch.

Lee’s public disappointment, on those tracks, was less that some people disliked the movie than that people never saw it. That is a director’s grievance, and it is also a distribution fact. USA Films never let the per-screen average in 11 theaters decide a wider bet. It let tests and a crowded holiday decide that the safest place for a $38 million western was a quiet specialty run and a DVD.

After Spider-Man, the Confederate File Stayed Closed

Maguire was 24 when the film opened, already the sensitive kid from The Ice Storm, Pleasantville, and The Cider House Rules, young enough that playing a teenage irregular did not look like stunt casting. In July 2000, less than a year after that Thanksgiving, Columbia closed him as Peter Parker. The studio had doubted he looked like a brawler. Sam Raimi wanted the good heart in the close-up. Spider-Man arrived in 2002 and reset the face.

A rerelease then would have asked audiences to watch the new web-slinger ride with Confederate irregulars, sack Lawrence, and take counsel from Holt. That is not a brand extension. It is a contradiction the marketing department of a Marvel launch would not volunteer. So the movie stayed where USA Films left it, while Maguire’s other late-90s dramas got recycled as origin stories for the boy in the suit.

Wright’s Holt is the performance the 2010 disc bothers to interview. Jewel did not star in another movie until Hallmark mysteries in 2017. Ulrich’s film leading-man window was already closing. The people with a later fame engine were Maguire and Lee, and neither fame engine had a use for Jake Roedel. Lee’s next film found the audience this one was denied. Maguire’s next persona made a Confederate bushwhacker harder to reintroduce, not easier.

The Most Unprofitable Picture of 1999

Schamus put the loss in a line he later tossed at Lee over drinks in New York, looking back at The Wedding Banquet, the 1993 comedy that had been that year’s most profitable film relative to cost.

The Wedding Banquet was the most proportionately profitable movie of 1993, and this one is the most proportionately unprofitable movie of 1999.

James Schamus, producer-screenwriter, to Ang Lee

He was doing arithmetic, not asking for sympathy. A $38 million production that returns $635,096 in U.S. theaters is a write-down, and the January wide date that never came is how a specialty label turns a prestige bet into a catalog title. Universal still owns the copyright, dated January 27, 2000. Focus Features, built from the Good Machine purchase, now sits on the library. The film is listed for digital purchase and rental on the studio’s home site, filed under action and adventure, a genre tag as optimistic as that 1999 poster.

As of late August, major storefronts were still charging about $3.99 to rent it, with no free subscription window in the United States. The people who keep circulating stills of Maguire in a slouch hat are not waiting for a algorithm to serve Peter Parker. They are the same viewers who put Lee’s film next to Walter Hill’s The Long Riders and argue about cheek wounds and Quantrill. Spine 514 is how that argument survived the 11-theater run. Jake Roedel is still a bushwhacker on that disc, and Holt is still the character the one-sheet could not name.