(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 8 January 2026 14:30, UK
Cinema’s biggest names don’t usually face too much trouble in getting their passion projects off the ground, but unfortunately for Kevin Bacon, he’s never been viewed as that big of a star.
Of course, everybody knows who Kevin Bacon is, and the chances are high that everyone has seen at least one movie in which he appears. However, while he’s an established, famous, successful, and talented performer who can play almost any kind of role, at no point has he been an A-lister.
That’s not meant to disparage him, since it was at least partially by design. He could have chased stardom, status, and leading man gigs in the aftermath of Footloose, but he didn’t want to be stuffed into a box that he couldn’t escape from, which led to plenty of short-term pain for long-term gain.
He’s definitely a household name, but when you think of some of the names in his age bracket who’ve been around for just as long and are currently in their 60s like he is, it’s not unfair to say Bacon has always dwelled on a rung of the Hollywood ladder below Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Eddie Murphy, Nicolas Cage, or Jim Carrey.
As a result, that made it much harder for him to lobby studios and production companies to fund a new version of a movie that he was desperate to make, even if the film in question was hard to watch. Then again, when he first started shopping around a remake of Takashi Miike’s Audition, Hollywood couldn’t get enough of mounting new versions of acclaimed Japanese horror flicks.
That should have stood him in decent stead, but it wasn’t to be. “I really tried for a lot of years to do an American version of it,” he told Film Updates. “We never really got it together. It was difficult for a lot of reasons. I was close, but we didn’t get all the way. But that is a great movie.”
Presumably, Bacon had his eyes on playing the Americanised iteration of either Ryo Ishibashi’s lonely widower, Shigeharu Aoyama, or Jun Kunimura’s movie producer, Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, since you’d imagine an actor with his reputation wouldn’t spend so much time pitching a redo of Audition without securing a plum role for himself, but the pieces never fell into place.
It’s been an incredibly tough nut for Tinseltown to crack, though, with several failed attempts at making it happen. Terminator producer Mario Kassar had Richard Gray lined up to direct in 2014, which vanished into the ether. In 2025, Speak No Evil helmer Christian Tafdrup was announced to be writing and directing a film that’s doing what many remakes do and claiming that it isn’t a remake at all, but an adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s source novel.
Maybe he’ll throw Bacon a bone and give him a part so that he can come a little closer to realising his dream, but based on its history, there are no guarantees that Audition V2.0 will make it in front of the cameras.
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