The Big Picture

• Keanu Reeves declined Speed 2 due to a strong dislike of the script. After his refusal, 20th Century Fox wouldn't work with him for a decade.
• Speed 2: Cruise Control was a critical and box office disaster, lacking chemistry between the two leads and suffering from a plot that falls flat.
• Reeves' career was saved by rejecting the sequel, leading to The Matrix and John Wick success.

Keanu Reeves was already a star in the early 1990s thanks to the Bill & Ted movies and Point Break, but in 1994 he became one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. This was because of a little movie called Speed, which was the seventh-biggest box office draw of the year, taking in $121 million on a $30 million budget. It wasn't just the great action about a bus that will blow up if it goes below fifty miles per hour that fans loved, but Reeves' leading man charisma and his hot chemistry with co-star Sandra Bullock. With Speed being such a success, it would only be a matter of time before there was a sequel. That day finally came in 1997 with Speed 2: Cruise Control, with a bus replaced with a gigantic cruise ship. Sandra Bullock came back, as did director Jan de Bont, but Keanu Reeves was nowhere to be found. That's because he said no, a wise move if you've seen the movie, but also one that nearly wrecked his career.

Why Keanu Reeves Turned Down 'Speed 2'

After Speed, Keanu Reeves was on top of the world, but he quickly discovered that he couldn't recreate that magic right away. The next few years saw him in movies like Johnny Mnemonic, A Walk in the Clouds, and Feeling Minnesota, none of which did very well with critics or audiences. He needed something big to right his ship (pun intended) and there it was, a sequel to Speed called Speed 2: Cruise Control. The plot would involve Jack Traven (Reeves) and Annie Porter (Bullock) now as a couple vacationing on a Caribbean cruise ship, but alas, there would be no time to rest, as they encounter another madman, who hacks the ship's controls and programs it to head straight for a crash into an oil tanker.

If you think the idea sounds silly, you're not the only one. Even though original director Jan de Bont was coming back, and he was coming off of another blockbuster success, Twister, Sandra Bullock originally passed before deciding that the $11 million check would help her finance Hope Floats. There would be no change of heart for Keanu Reeves, who went off to make The Devil's Advocate with Al Pacino and Charlize Theron, a success that got his path to megastardom back on track. That wasn't the only reason he said no, though, for overriding everything was the simple fact that he didn't like the script.

In a 2015 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Reeves told the host:

"I loved working with [director] Jan de Bont and Sandra, of course. It was just a situation in life where I got the script and I read the script and I was like, 'Ugh.' It was about a cruise ship and I was thinking, 'A bus, a cruise ship… Speed, bus, but then a cruise ship is even slower than a bus and I was like, 'I love you guys, but I just can't do it.' "

'Speed 2: Cruise Control' Is One of the Worst Sequels Ever Made

Despite bringing back director Jan de Bont and Sandra Bullock, Speed 2: Cruise Control is one of the worst sequels ever made. It was a dud at the box office, making only $48 million on an insane $160 million budget. Blowing up ships isn't cheap! Critics weren't any kinder, as Speed 2 sits at an abysmal 4% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yikes. It showed that summer movie theater audiences aren't as gullible as they're treated. We might love our sequels, but they have to mean something. It's not just Speed's clever plot that put our butts in the seats and made that film an instant action classic, but the chemistry between Reeves and Bullock. With Keanu Reeves not involved, one of our reasons for watching was gone. If he was out, why should we be in?

Keanu Reeves is irreplaceable, but Speed 2 tried it anyway. LAPD cop Jack Traven gave way to LAPD cop Alex Shaw, played by Jason Patric, a fine actor, but no megastar like Reeves. Whatever Reeves was going to do was simply given to Patric instead, as he became Annie's boyfriend, with Jack Traven written out in a few lines of dialogue. What?! You mean we went through all of that hotness with Jack and Annie in Speed just for them to break up?! It made no sense. We wanted to see Annie and Jack, not Annie and Alex. Still, that's what we got, and maybe Speed 2 could have made this new relationship work, but everything about the follow-up is flat.

Willem Dafoe is an acting genius, but his role as Speed 2's villain, John Geiger, gave us a wide-eyed parody of a villain who was nowhere near as sinister as Dennis Hopper's mad bomber, Howard Payne. Speed 2 is nothing more than action scene after action scene, which is fine if there is meaning behind it, but it comes across as a cover-up for the lack of an interesting plot and memorable characters. We don't want the bus in Speed to blow up because we have been made to care about every single character, not just Jack and Annie. Speed 2 forgets this, so let the cruise ship blow up to smithereens for all we care. Even Annie is somehow wrong in Speed 2. Instead of being funny and charming, she's shockingly annoying and unlikable with barely anything to do other than whine and run away. Still, there is plenty of comedy, so much so that it lessens the suspense. Speed 2: Cruise Control is a lazy cash grab, but the big problem is that it forgot to grab the cash.

Twentieth Century Fox Wouldn't Work With Keanu Reeves Again for a Decade

The idea of a runaway cruise ship moving slowly across the ocean certainly isn't exciting as a fast movie bus encountering every obstacle possible in downtown Los Angeles, and Reeves was smart enough to know that. He also admitted that the decision hurt his career, as he confessed in a 2019 interview with GQ, saying that his refusal resulted in Twentieth Century Fox placing him in "movie jail" for a decade. Reeves added, "I didn't work with [Fox] again until [2008's] The Day the Earth Stood Still."

With 20th Century Fox being one of Hollywood's top studios, this decision could have seriously hurt Reeves' career, which was perhaps one more bad movie away from pushing him down the rung of leading men. To the rescue came one of 20th Century Fox's top competitors, Warner Bros., where in 1999 he played Neo in some movie called The Matrix, a part he got after Will Smith turned it down. The $63 million budget, twice that of Speed, was a big risk, but it paid off, with The Matrix making a jaw-dropping $463 million worldwide and leading to the launch of a franchise.

Reeves' stunt double in The Matrix was a man named Chad Stahelski, who had also played the body double for Brandon Lee in The Crow after the actor tragically passed away during filming in a gun stunt gone wrong. The two became great friends, and years later, when Keanu Reeves accepted a role in John Wick, he turned to his friend to ask for his thoughts. Stahelski ended up asking if he could direct the movie himself and the rest is history, with the former stuntman having directed all four films in the franchise. It makes you wonder about the chain of events that brought Keanu Reeves to where he is now as the biggest action star on the planet. Would The Matrix and John Wick be the pop culture institutions they are now if he had folded and said yes to Speed 2? Thankfully, we'll never know.

Speed 2: Cruise Control is available to stream on Starz in the U.S.

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