From Mike Fleming’s post over at Deadline | New York about Marvel Studios making an offer to Chris Evans to play Captain America, which Evans has not yet agreed to, presumably because he doesn’t want to be typecast:

Josh Hartnett turned down the chance to play Superman several years ago for similar reasons, even though the three-picture pact could have paid him nearly $100 million.

Every time I’m reminded of that decision, which is a psuedo-famous one in Hollywood, I think that Josh Hartnett is crazy. But this time I realized that I actually applauded Dave Chappelle’s decision to walk away from the $50 million that Comedy Central was offering him to continue his run on the Chappelle Show. And that made me question my stance on Hartnett’s decision.

Now, there are some differences between the two, the biggest being that Chappelle (from what I remember) walked away from the Comedy Central deal because of the intense pressure he’d be under to satisfy the network after they’d have made that type of investment, a pressure so overbearing that he likened it to losing creative control of the show that bore his name. Hartnett, on the other hand, as a hired gun to step into a universe that other people had created, was under no such pressure. He simply had to act as well as he could and find out, along with the decision makers, if he actually was a good choice for the role.

Now, this is only a discussion because we know how Hartnett’s career has gone since then. Prior to his February, 2003 decision to turn down the Superman gig, Hartnett was coming off two huge blockbusters and one solid hit - 2001′s Michael bay-directed Pearl Harbor, which grossed $449 million worldwide, and Ridley Scott-directed Black Hawk Down, which grossed $173 million worldwide, and 2002′s 40 Days and 40 Nights, which ended up with a hefty $95 million worldwide gross.

So if you put yourself in Hartnett’s shoes at the time, you’d think, “yeah, $100m is nice and all, but I’d rather continue working with the entire spectrum of Hollywood’s elite directors, and I’d rather throw myself into a variety of stories and genres. Yes, $100m is a lot of money to walk away from, but I’m a bonafide movie star, now, and while I might not make all that money in one place, I’ll definitely earn that much over the course of my next few projects. So thank you, Warner Bros., but no thank you - Josh Hartnett’s soul is not for supersale.”

…I suppose I’m assuming that Josh Hartnett liked weird and weak puns.

Regardless, you can easily see how Hartnett and his team came to their decision. The rub comes in the form of Harnett’s project selection and box office performance since then: 2003′s Harrison Ford-starrer Hollywood Homicide, which earned $51 million worldwide on a $75 million budget – a huge flop, 2004′s Wicker Park, which earned $21 million worldwide, 2005′s Sin City, in which he only made a brief appearance as part of an ensemble cast, 2006′s Lucky Number Slevin, which earned $56 million worldwide, a disappointment for an action flick that also starred Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, and Lucy Liu, 2006′s Mozart and the Whale, which must have been all kinds of awful to only earn $84 thousand worldwide on a $12 million budget, 2006′s Brian De Palma-directed Black Dahlia, which almost broke even with a $49 million worldwide gross, 2007′s Resurrecting the Champ, another box office bomb with a $3 million gross, despite the presence of Samuel L. Jackson, 2007′s 30 Days of Night, which was a modest hit with a $75 million worldwide gross on a $30 million budget, and 2008′s August, which did not even get an international release and ended up with a $12 thousand gross.

The only film that really hit at the box office at all in that span was an ensemble piece, Sin City. Everything else, films that Hartnett actually top-lined, did mostly poorly.

So, with that in mind, you have to wonder if he regrets turning down the superloot, or, if, despite his obvious current box office struggles, he’s happy that he turned down the Superman role because it allowed him complete freedom to work on the projects he most wanted to work on.

My suspicion is that he doesn’t have any regrets at all. Because when it comes down to it, the purpose of money is to buy you freedom. And if it does the opposite, then you have to question why you’d want it. Just ask Dave Chappelle – he agrees with me. And it appears that so, too, does one Mr. Josh Hartnett. And that’s just super, man. (Oh!)

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