‘The Lowdown’s Ethan Hawke Made His Acting Debut in This Box Office Bomb

Ethan Hawke in the 1985 film Explorers. — Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection

What To Know

Ethan Hawke’s film debut was in the 1985 sci-fi adventure Explorers, where he starred alongside River Phoenix in a story about kids building a spaceship, directed by Joe Dante.
Despite its creative premise, Explorers flopped at the box office due to rushed editing, poor studio support, and unfortunate release timing.

Ethan Hawke has had a four-decade career in Hollywood and is currently in the midst of a great second act, with starring roles in FX’s The Lowdown, which just wrapped its first season, and the hit Black Phone film franchise. But while most of us first discovered the star, who turns 55 on November 6, 2025, from his star-making turn in 1989’s Dead Poets Society, his actual film debut came four years earlier, in a little-seen E.T. copycat film called Explorers. Why haven’t you heard of it? Decades after its release, the film’s director still bemoans the way the studio changed the film.

What was Explorers, Ethan Hawke’s first film?

Released in 1985, the film starred a 14-year-old Hawke alongside another newcomer, River Phoenix. Directed by Joe Dante, who had just come off the success of Gremlins, it told the story of three suburban kids who build a homemade spaceship and take off into the stars.

In the film, Hawke plays Ben Crandall, a kid who spends his nights watching old sci-fi movies and sketching strange designs inspired by his vivid dreams. He teams up with Wolfgang, played by Phoenix, and their friend Darren to turn those dreams into a working spacecraft. Together, they launch themselves into outer space where they encounter curious aliens who’ve learned everything they know about humans from television reruns.

EXPLORERS, Jason Presson, Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, 1985

Paramount/Everett Collection

Joe Dante revealed, in a 2016 interview with The Wrap, that Hawke began his Hollywood career by accident: he hadn’t even planned on auditioning for the film. Instead, he accompanied a friend to the audition. “He wasn’t an actor or anything!” the director recalled. “He had braces. He was kind of awkward and gawky and I thought he was cute. So I figured let’s give him these pages and see if he wants to do this — and he ended up getting the lead in a Paramount picture over all these professional Disney kids.”

Why was Ethan Hawke’s first film such a box office bomb?

Behind the scenes, though, Explorers was as chaotic as it was creative. Dante later revealed that the studio rushed the film into theaters before it was finished editing, demanding a summer release date even though it could have used more polish that only time could provide. “[The studio] ruined it by releasing it before it was finished, then didn’t support it with advertising — so it bombed and they lost a fortune,” director Dante told The Wrap in 2016.

The release timing couldn’t have been worse, arriving just a week before the Live Aid concert and only nine days after Back to the Future dominated the box office. The movie flopped, earning less than $10 million, and quietly disappeared from theaters soon after.

Paramount/Everett Collection

Despite its rocky debut, Explorers found a second life on VHS and cable, where kids who missed it in theaters discovered its strange charm. Over time, it developed a cult following and became a favorite among fans of Dante’s work. For Hawke, the experience was the first step on a long and impressive career. Just four years later, he would break out in Dead Poets Society, and the rest is history.

What does Ethan Hawke think of his first film?

Hawke has been much kinder when talking about Explorers than Dante — though he’s often sidestepped the actual film, and instead focused on his on-set memories. The actor told Dread Central in 2012 that he learned a lot about B-movie, horror and sci-fi history in the time he spent on set making Explorers: “I feel like I’m one of the few people of my generation that has firsthand knowledge of Roger Corman and what those B-movies were about and how great they were because of working with Joe Dante.”