Kim Kardashian Almost Walked Away From ‘The Fifth Wheel’ After ‘All’s Fair’ Backlash

Kim Kardashian came this close to walking away from her next movie before cameras even finished rolling on it. Not because she lost interest, not because of a scheduling clash, but because the internet got in her head.

In a new episode of The Kardashians, the 46-year-old reality star admitted that the brutal reaction to her Hulu legal drama All’s Fair left her so shaken that she seriously considered pulling out of The Fifth Wheel, the upcoming comedy directed by Eva Longoria. She didn’t just think about it in passing, either. She was ready to call the whole thing off and tell the filmmakers not to worry about it.

It’s a startlingly honest admission from someone who has spent nearly two decades building an empire on never looking rattled. Kim Kardashian, of all people, rattled? By critics? Apparently, yes.

The confession that stopped fans in their tracks

Speaking in a confessional on the show, Kim laid out exactly where her head was at after All’s Fair premiered to a wave of mockery. “I think coming off of such criticism for All’s Fair, I got insecure,” she said. Then came the part that really landed: she started wondering whether the people behind The Fifth Wheel even wanted her there anymore.

“I was like, ‘Do they want [me] out of the movie? Are they so nervous, do they maybe not want to attach [my name] to the movie?'” she said. Her solution, in her own telling, was to get ahead of the awkwardness and offer to quit first. “I was like, ‘I totally understand, I’ll fully back out, don’t worry.’ I also wanna be respectful, like maybe that is the right thing to do,” she continued. “I just wouldn’t want people to feel like, ‘Ugh, we have to work with this one… Buckle up, we’re gonna get the worst critics in the world.'”

Read that again. One of the most famous women on the planet was convinced she had become a liability to her own movie, and her instinct was to apologize her way out of the job before anyone could ask her to leave. That’s not the Kim Kardashian of the tabloid headlines. That’s someone who took the criticism personally, even if she’d never say so in an Instagram caption.

Why All’s Fair hit so hard

To understand why the backlash stung, it helps to remember what All’s Fair was supposed to be. The Ryan Murphy series, which landed on Hulu, cast Kim as Allura Grant, a high-powered divorce attorney running an all-female law firm alongside a genuinely heavyweight ensemble including Glenn Close and Sarah Paulson. This wasn’t a cameo or a reality-show guest spot. It was Kim’s biggest scripted swing yet, a role clearly designed to announce that she could hold her own in a prestige drama.

Then the reviews arrived, and they were not kind. The show opened to a rare 0% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a number so stark it became a news story all on its own. It eventually climbed to 6%, which is technically better and still not something you’d frame. Audiences were kinder, giving it a 65% Popcornmeter score, but the critical drubbing dominated the conversation. Clips of Kim’s line readings circulated endlessly, and the show became a punchline within days of premiering.

Kim’s first public response was pure deflection with a wink. In a social media post after the premiere, she sarcastically asked fans if they had “tuned in to the most critically acclaimed show of the year.” Funny, sure. But the new Kardashians episode suggests the jokes were covering up something real. Behind the sarcasm, she was questioning whether she should be taking acting jobs at all.

Her co-stars, notably, didn’t pile on. Both Glenn Close and Sarah Paulson publicly reacted to the negative reviews in defense of the show and its cast, a show of support that said plenty about the atmosphere on set. When legends like that have your back, it helps. It just didn’t erase the noise completely.

The movie she almost gave up

So what exactly is The Fifth Wheel, the film Kim nearly walked away from? It’s a comedy directed by Eva Longoria, and by all accounts it’s a very different beast from the glossy courtroom world of All’s Fair. Kim stars alongside Brenda Song, Nikki Glaser, and Fortune Feimster, a lineup that promises something looser, funnier, and far less self-serious.

Photos from the set have already given fans a taste of the tone. Kim was spotted dressed as a Vegas showgirl filming a wild escape scene with Will Ferrell, which sounds like the kind of gloriously unhinged sequence that plays to her strengths: big personality, total commitment, and a willingness to look ridiculous. Comedy, arguably, has always been a more natural fit for Kim than prestige drama. Her best screen moments over the years have come when she’s leaning into the absurdity, not fighting it.

And here’s the twist in the story: the criticism didn’t actually push her out. It pushed her in harder. Kim revealed that the All’s Fair drubbing made her determined to work even harder on The Fifth Wheel, to prove to herself as much as anyone else that she could deliver. “So, I was like, if I suck in this, then it’s over for me,” she said, in a line that manages to be both funny and a little heartbreaking. No pressure, then.

She also made clear that once she got on set, she had a genuinely great time making the movie. The insecurity didn’t vanish, but it didn’t win either. She stayed, she worked, and by her own account she enjoyed herself. That’s a better ending than the one she almost chose.

A career built on proving people wrong

Here’s the thing about Kim Kardashian and criticism: they go back a long way. She has been underestimated in public for almost her entire adult life. When Keeping Up With the Kardashians premiered in 2007, plenty of people wrote the whole family off as a flash in the pan. Eighteen years later, she’s still here, and the empire she built in the meantime is no joke.

SKIMS alone turned her from a reality star with a clothing line into a serious business figure, a billion-dollar shapewear and apparel brand that reshaped an entire category. She studied law, advocated for criminal justice reform, and helped real people get out of prison. She built a beauty empire, sold it, and started again. Every time the conventional wisdom said she was done, she added another line to the resume.

Acting is the one arena where the verdict has stayed stubbornly mixed. Her turn in American Horror Story: Delicate earned her a surprising amount of respect, with plenty of viewers admitting she was better than they expected. All’s Fair swung the pendulum hard in the other direction. The honest truth is probably somewhere in the middle: she’s a developing actor with real screen presence and a long way to go, working in an industry that loves nothing more than a famous person to dunk on.

That’s what makes this confession land. Most celebrities at Kim’s level would never admit that a Rotten Tomatoes score made them want to quit a job. They’d post a vacation photo, say “haters gonna hate,” and move on. Kim, on her own show, on camera, said the quiet part out loud: the criticism got to her, it made her doubt herself, and for a moment she was ready to walk away from something she wanted.

What happens next

The Fifth Wheel doesn’t have a confirmed release date yet, but whenever it arrives, it will now land with a very different story attached to it. It’s no longer just Kim Kardashian’s new comedy. It’s the movie she almost quit, the one she decided to fight for instead. That’s a narrative audiences tend to root for, and it’s certainly a better setup than another round of “can she act?” discourse.

And if the film works, if the comedy clicks the way her fans expect it to, the All’s Fair chapter will look less like a verdict and more like a rough patch. Every actor has one. The difference is that most of them don’t have theirs scored at 0% and dissected by millions of people in real time.

Kim Kardashian didn’t quit. She stayed, she worked harder, and she told the story herself before anyone else could tell it for her. That, more than any review score, is the move of someone who plans on sticking around.

Source: Just Jared