When William Goldman sat down to write the screenplay, he didn't yet know the film would become one of the most underrated "progenitors" of the 2000s poker boom. And Roy Huggins — creator of the original 1957 series — laid down a character architecture that Hollywood would exploit for another thirty years.
The film's finale is arguably the most audacious poker scene in mainstream cinema history. Bret Maverick (Mel Gibson) refuses to look at the last card. He feels it. He says: "When I really need a card, I know what it is." He flips it — ace of spades. Royal flush. Pot.
Beautiful. But completely atypical for poker mechanics. In actual five-card draw poker (which is what they play in the film), the odds of getting a royal flush from a random deal are around 1 in 649,740. And this very "magic" is the foundation of the entire film.
This isn't a bug — it's the whole point. The viewer must believe that Maverick isn't an ordinary cheat, but someone whose cards actually obey his will. Without this belief, not a single joke in the film works.
When William Goldman wrote the screenplay in the early 1990s, he wasn't working from scratch, but from the cult series Maverick (ABC, 1957–1962). And here's what matters: the creator of both "Mavericks" is the same architect-practitioner.
Roy Huggins (1914–2002) — a man whose name only the most meticulous cinephiles know, but whose characters everyone recognizes:
All three are essentially the same archetype: smart, ironic, gaming the system from within. Huggins proved time and again: audiences love a protagonist who wins not with muscle but with brains. And in 1994, Warner Bros. decided: let's pull Bret Maverick off the dusty shelf and reassemble him.
In the collection Five Screenplays with Essays (2000), Goldman described the original version of the finale. It had a scene with an old hermit woman (played by Linda Hunt) who told Maverick:
"You think you can summon a card. You can't. But the magic — it's in you."
The editors cut the scene — deemed it broke the pace. And in the theatrical release, only the ace of spades remained. No explanation. No "how." Just magic and a smile.
This, by the way, is Goldman's signature move — director Richard Donner later said Goldman "always writes two endings: one for the studio, one for himself." In the case of Maverick, the theatrical release got the "for himself" version — open, mythological, defying rational analysis.
Most Hollywood films about poker are an embarrassment to anyone who's ever held cards. They play "the wrong thing," "from the wrong position," bluff with weak hands at the wrong moment, etc. Maverick is an exception.
A few facts:
The film's most honest line isn't about poker. It's when Zane Cooper (Garner) says: "I don't play poker. I watch those who play." This is actually the philosophy of the entire film: the real game isn't at the table, but above the table — in heads, in arrangements, in who outsmarts whom first.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Budget | $75M |
| North American gross | $101.6M (55.5%) |
| International gross | $81.4M (44.5%) |
| Worldwide total | $183M |
| 1994 NA rank | 12th |
| 1994 worldwide rank | 15th |
| All-time western rank (NA, as of 2013) | 6th |
| Rotten Tomatoes | 67% (avg 5.9/10) |
| Metacritic | 62/100 |
| CinemaScore (audience) | A− |
| Runtime | 127 min |
Warner Bros. got 2.4× budget at the box office. And this doesn't include home video, TV licenses, and pinball machines. By 1994 standards — a solid hit, especially given the summer competition.
"Maverick" is the last true western genre "hybrid" before westerns definitively moved into arthouse and independent cinema (Unforgiven 1992 was already a dark deconstruction, Tombstone 1993 — a bronze classic, Legends of the Fall 1994 — a melodrama). After Maverick, major studios essentially stopped making comedy westerns. It was the end of an era.
But there's a second, less obvious layer. The film showed a completely new image of poker to mass audiences:
This image penetrated pop culture through Rounders (1998, with Matt Damon and Edward Norton), through early 2000s online tournaments, and — ultimately — through the 2003 poker boom, when Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker won $2.5M at the World Series of Poker through a $39 online satellite. The boom brought millions of new players into poker, and many of them first saw what "real" poker looks like precisely in films like Maverick.
So when you hear that poker "went mainstream in the 2000s" — know this: the foundation of that mainstream was laid ten years earlier, in 1994, on the tugboat Portland, decorated as the Lauren Belle, with Mel Gibson refusing to look at the last card.
In the finale, it's revealed that Zane Cooper is Bret Maverick's father. They'd been conning everyone together from the very beginning. This is a mirror structure with the original 1957 series: there, Bret and Bart were brothers, and also conned everyone together. Huggins laid down family codes of deception from the start — and Goldman read it perfectly and transferred it to screen 37 years later.
That is, Maverick (1994) isn't a remake. It's a continuation of Huggins' tradition, with a new cast, but with the same con DNA: "a family that swindles everyone together."
When Donner filmed the final bathtub scene, Garner asked Gibson how he pulled the ace of spades. Gibson answered with one word. The same one as in the film: "Magic." And smiled. Donner said he'd never had a simpler perfect take in his life.
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