Clint Eastwood is many things including a legend, an icon, a multi-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker, and one of the most titanic presences in Hollywood with a legacy that will endure forever, but “ambitious” is rarely something that can be applied to his directorial efforts, with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima standing out as the exception to the rule.
That’s not say he always plays it safe, but you can generally rely on an Eastwood-helmed picture to be unfussy, straight to the point, and reliably economical. However, he opted to take a surprising page out of the blockbuster playbook in the mid-2000s when he shot a pair of war epics back-to-back on combined production costs of over $100 million.
Despite being told from two different perspectives – one focusing on the American point of view on the conflict and the other revolving around the Japanese forces – the pair were always going to be pitted against one another, with Letters from Iwo Jima comfortably emerging as the clear winner.
Flags of Our Fathers was made for $90 million, tanked at the box office by earning just $66 million, and scored a solid-if-unspectacular Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 73 percent. Meanwhile, Letters from Iwo Jima was four times cheaper at a cost of $19 million, recouped its budget three times over, hit 94 percent on the aforementioned aggregation site, and scooped four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director.
That being said, it’s the opening salvo that’s been winning the battle on streaming this week, with FlixPatrol revealing Flags of Our Fathers as one of the top-viewed features on iTunes, while Letters from Iwo Jima is currently nowhere to be seen.