Films that may have flopped but not because of you, because you did your part and bought a ticket.
Despite overwhelmingly positive critical reviews, Children of Men lost money in its 2006 theatrical run. Most people I knew had never heard of it, and the only person I knew who had seen it was the friend I went to the theater with. It’s now generally regarded as one of the best films of the 21st Century (so far) and particularly lauded for its cinematography. It’s had a very successful home video run since then and is even more relevant today than on its release.
Seriously? Shit I saw it three times in theaters. I thought it was a masterpiece. Hopefully it’s getting some of the recognition it deserves now.
The Fifth Element was kinda a flop in the USA, but I loved it. The alien opera bit was awesome in the theater.
I didn’t know it was a flop at release. It’s in my top 5 of all time, so I’m super biased. Absolute legend of a film.
I didn’t know it was a flop either.
super green
I really enjoyed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It got panned by the critics and didn’t do well at the box office, but seems to be being more accepted recently.
It’s a fun ride, but I don’t know if I can say it’s exactly a good movie. It’s trying to scratch that same adventure itch as The Mummy or Indiana Jones, but I don’t think it does it quite as well.
A lot of that was due to how badly they butchered the graphic novels.
I enjoy the movie - but it’s definitely not the comic.
Does waterworld count as a cult classic these days? I think so but I could be wrong. I thought I was going insane when it came out because I absolutely loved it and seemingly everyone else couldn’t stand it for one minute!
I friggin’ love that movie. Same with The Postman. Why does Kevin Costner make movies that are just so much better than they have any right to be?
Postman is so good. Love the Tom Petty cameo
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I loved it too. It’s silly but fun.
I think if it had been less expensive to make perhaps it wouldn’t have flopped so spectacularly.
John Carpenter’s The Thing was critically and commercially panned on release. It lost the special effects Oscar to ET. It got such a bad response John Carpenter considered retiring.
Absolutely shocking in hindsight.
It’s genuinely my favorite horror movie ever. Insane to me that it did poorly, but shit happens.
Weird Al’s UHF is hilarious and would have done well except that it came out the same weekend as a whooole bunch of other classic movies. The weekend of July 21, 1989 the other movies you could see were:
- Ghostbusters II
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- When Harry Met Sally
- Dead Poet’s Society
- Batman
- Lethal Weapon 2
- Weekend at Bernie’s
- Karate Kid III
Spatula City vs. Gotham City
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Did you mean Last Crusade?
I couldn’t find anyone wanted to go see Shawshank when it came out. I was probably one of a dozen people in the theater.
I just got my wife to watch it for the first time this past week. Possibly my favorite movie ever.
Not critically acclaimed by a long shot but I really loved Speed Racer when I saw it in the theater.
I’m confident in saying that Speed Racer is the best Wachowski film.
That’s the first one that came to mind for me too! Kid me absolutely loved it in theaters, and it only gets better with age. It’s so stylistically out there, there’s really nothing that looks quite like it.
Another one of my favorites was Tron: Legacy. Again, blew my mind in theaters, and I’ve come to love it even more now. I don’t think this one was a flop exactly, though it did underperform. It’s similar to Speed Racer in that it’s very visually-focused with a super unique aesthetic, though the emphasis on practical effects and physical camera stuff (lens flares etc) gives it a completely different feel that I love too.
I watched Tron Legacy in the theatre, I thought it was really good, the soundtrack was amazing but as soon as I left the theatre I never felt like seeing it again, maybe it was just fine tipped over the edge by a great soundtrack?
I saw Tron in the theater in 1982! How about that? I’d forgotten all about it, until just now that I read the word “Tron”.
There was an arcade next door, of course - they had the Tron game! A guy was playing like a wizard, I asked if he’d gone next door to see it, he looked at me and said - “I’ve seen it four times”. I wonder where that guy is now. Did he go into computer engineering or something like that, just at the right time when the industry was about to explode in size?
I watched the cartoon a lot when I was a kid. I thought the movie did a remarkably good job capturing the bizarre tone of the show. It was a “weirdly campy, but serious at the same time” kind of tone. The film captured the strangeness too well, and I think that’s part of the reason critics didn’t like it. They just didn’t get it, and to be honest, I can’t totally blame them for that.
Blade Runner. It did very poorly at the box office, and the critics were lukewarm at best, but I loved it. I was a big fan of Philip K. Dick, so a film by Ridley Scott based on one of his novels was right up my alley. I dragged my friend to see it the week it came out, and I was blown away. Even back then I wasn’t alone. It almost immediately became a cult film that regularly played in smaller repertory theaters.
I remember reading an interview with Arthur C. Clarke back then where he mentioned that he had recently spoken with Stanley Kubrick, and Kubrick had said that Blade Runner was the most visually beautiful film he had ever seen.
I feel like the sequel had similar problems. I think it did end up making its money back but based on what they spent vs what it made it wasn’t a home run at all. But everyone I’ve talked to who has seen it thought it was great, myself included.
I get the feeling that both the original and the sequel are the kind of film where word of mouth just doesn’t do it for some reason. I had a friend years ago who mentioned that she had never seen Blade Runner, and immediately followed that by saying not to bother telling her how good it was.
There was this duplex in '82 that was showing Blade Runner (rated R) on one screen and Clint Eastwood’s Cold War thriller Firefox (rated PG) on the other. As an unaccompanied teen I had to see Firefox, but I do remember that Vangelis soundtrack, which you could hear from the lobby area. I really wanted to see it then, but it didn’t happen until I rented the VHS tape a year later, maybe even a bit longer than that.
I’m not sure if Death To Smoochy counts as a cult classic, but it damn well ought to. Screw critics, screw naysayers: That movie is bold, and it is fucking hilarious.
I think Stargate didn’t do very well when it came out, but then went on to spawn several TV series.
I was surprised when I learned that because the shows were really fun.
Indeed.
Not only did it spawn multiple spin-offs, sg1 was the longest running sci-fi series
I had trouble with the show. I really wanted to like it, but there are too many things I didn’t like about it. But the movie was amazing. I just watched it for the first time in the past year.
How far along did you get in the show? It starts out sort of slow and cheesy, but ramps up to having really big overarching storylines and super epic battles!
Like 4 episodes. I’ve heard it gets better, I just can’t bring myself to watch it. Maybe I’ll try Atlantis and then go back to the original.
I have a really hard time with the recasting.
With a lot of TV from that era you have to accept the first season is the show figuring itself out. 4 episodes, really isn’t enough.
The best approach is just to skip boring chunks/episodes and move on to the next. Then when your hooked going back is worth it.
With Stargate while its an episodic format, events in past episodes are incorporated and it slowly starts building a complex universe.
Atlantis starts in SG1 season 5 and there are constant events in one series affecting the other one as a result.
Thanks for letting me know. Maybe I will give it another try. I just finished Star Trek tonight.
I didn’t see it in theaters, iirc, but I wore out the VHS tape as a kid.
Dredd and John Carter. In both cases the film was tanked by marketing (or lack thereof).
I absolutely loved Dredd when I finally got around to seeing it at home. The visuals made me wish I had seen it in theaters. It was so viciously and grotesquely beautiful.
If they had just called it “John Carter of Mars” it would have at least communicated a major plot point. It was a really ambitious attempt to reboot a classic science fiction novel, but since nobody remembered what Barsoom was they were at a disadvantage.
YES. “Who the hell is John Carter? Oh, it’s about some guy on Mars? Okay, I’ll go see that.”
I still maintain that while not the same disaster as a film that it was as an investment, John Carter was muddy, its source material was past its sell-by date, and it topped out at “okay.” I’m not at all sure added marketing budget would have made enough additional fans to have made it worthwhile.
The John Carter source material was so old that I imagine the movie was championed by dinosaur executives who remembered loving it when they were kids. Their underlings were afraid to say no.
That probably isn’t how things went down, but it’s my head canon.
IIRC it was a passion property for Andrew Stanton, who was coming off of one of the most insanely good Pixar resumes in an era of amazing Pixar resumes.
Unfortunately, when something is old and influential, a modern audience is going to have seen things influenced by it for decades, and the original can sometimes become a kind of “inside baseball” that only appeals to the passion of people who are into the historical context of their fields.
Nobody is making millions off of Citizen Kane or Metropolis.
Dredd was a great movie. It’s an apology to the fans after the Stallone movie.
The original Blade Runner (1982) didn’t do as well as expected at the box office upon release. I originally thought it lost money but when conducting research for this post I found that it apparently did turn a small profit according to Wikipedia.
Now it’s considered a cult classic and some argue it’s one of the best sci-fi movies ever made and its influence can be felt in many other movies, TV shows, anime/manga, and games.
I really enjoyed Waterworld.
If we go all the way back to 1980, the classic example is Heaven’s Gate by Deerhunter director Michael Cimino. I was alive but way too young to have bought a ticket. It was a disaster. Cost over $40m and made only $3-4m. Bankrupt United Artists, killed the western genre, was a critical and commercial failure. Pretty much destroyed Cimino’s standing as a director. However, it has since been critical re-evaluated, in part due to a couple of new edits. IMHO it’s alright. A bit long, and no Deerhunter. But it didn’t deserve the reputation.
Fun fact, Heavens Gate contained so much animal cruelty, it’s one of if not the primary cause of the “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie” label we see in movies now a days. Among the list of terrible acts, they killed at least 4 horses, one of which was blown up with dynamite, and they gave many others PTSD. The wiki entry is eye opening.
That isn’t fun at all :(
Yeah that stuff is pretty grim. By all accounts Cimino was unleashed and unhinged on this movie. Some of the egregious scenes of animal cruelty were removed from later edits, for what it’s worth.