How I learnt to love the box-office flop

As soon as anyone starts learning about the film business, we’re fed the idea that box-office flops are bad. Bad for the industry – all that wasteful splurging! Bad for directors and stars – after Showgirls (1995), name one film you’ve seen Elizabeth Berkley in? Bad for viewers – anyone unfortunate enough to be sat there in a near-empty auditorium as the lights come down.

The most dubious assumption is that flops must be bad in themselves. Losing money is held as the incontrovertible proof of a film botching its assignment. There’s a lot of this going around in 2024, with the twinned debacles of Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed Megalopolis and the doomed sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. The headlines conflate creative and commercial disaster as if they’re always two sides of the same coin. Yes, they may often line up, but the general prejudice needs to be unlearned.

As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I developed a weirdly precocious interest in why films came along and flopped. The first ones I read about were largely unloveable affairs – the pairing of Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as unwitting secret agents in Ishtar (1987), Bruce Willis prancing around as a singing cat burglar in Hudson Hawk (1991), and Arnie going meta for Last Action Hero (1993). A great deal of ink was spent on these runaway productions, with big stars flailing in would-be spectacular comedies. The films tried to buy their way out of trouble; they came from sister studios, Columbia Pictures and TriStar. They were deals – not sensible projects – cleaving to the vain idea that male stars parodying themselves would be audience catnip.

I later realised that box-office failure can be down to a host of factors that have nothing to do with the achievement on screen – the timing, the marketing, an audience simply not ready for the film. On video and then DVD, I must have watched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and John Carpenter’s The Thing a half-dozen times apiece in my student days. Both were eviscerated at the box office, in the summer of 1982, by Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. And no one’s knocking ET. But it was easy to see how a cuddly, family-friendly sci-fi landmark gained the upper hand over the rain, snow and despair of those other masterworks.

I loved these underdogs the most. Their initial failure was a huge facet of their ongoing cult appeal. I was next curious to see why Scott’s Blade Runner follow-up Legend (1985), a dark fantasy with Tom Cruise wearing chainmail over short-shorts, had gone so wrong. It’s nowhere near as good, of course – cramped, joyless, dingy – but I still needed to know all about it. Did anyone think this subterranean nightmare was suitable for kids? I was creeped out when I finally saw Legend, and couldn’t help imagining how grim it must have been to make, for months on end at Pinewood Studios. Cruise never speaks of it. The entire set burned down during a lunch break in June 1984, and had to be rebuilt on another soundstage.

This kind of behind-the-scenes lore attracts me to flops, too. They’re reliably great stories, prising open the mechanics of film production. No one, except studio heads, wants to hear about smooth sailing behind the scenes. Disasters – total, or narrowly averted – are like crack to be regaled with.

The floppiest year of the Nineties was 1995. The sleazy dominion of Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was ended by the one-two of Showgirls, which needs no introduction, and William Friedkin’s Jade, the latest, tawdriest and least coherent rip-off of Basic Instinct, which did pitifully at the box office. Jade’s star, David Caruso, toplined another crime flop, Kiss of Death, playing an ex-con, and his film career would never recover. (He “lost” the Razzie for Worst New Star that year to Elizabeth Berkley, naturally.) There was also a pair of commercial misfires for Sylvester Stallone: the hit-man face-off Assassins and Judge Dredd, his clunky attempt at dystopian law enforcement. Both made Sly look like an expired hunk of salami.

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There was also Waterworld, pre-hyped as the biggest flop ever, because of a budget that rose to some $175m (£135m). The knives were out for Kevin Costner in the press and in Hollywood – indecently sharpened. It was dubbed “Kevin’s Gate”. “Fishtar”. His previous release, the ever-so-dry, three-hours-plus frontier western Wyatt Earp (1994), had already tanked, so the schadenfreude had a run-up.

But there was something phoney and willed, actively malicious, about the anti-hype for Waterworld. The film – perfectly fine! – was badly hurt by predictions of calamity at the US box office, but not abroad. It would still gross $275m (£211m) globally, and became a VHS hit, easily breaking even over time. It’s the megaflop that wasn’t one. The true pirate disaster of that year was Renny Harlin’s $100m (£76m) Cutthroat Island, which didn’t capsize because of being especially bad – it’s also quite fun! – but because the company that made it, Carolco, had overborrowed to an insane degree and went bankrupt right before it opened.

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Prestige attractions that year flopped, too – sometimes for good reasons (Demi Moore’s giggle-inducing bodice-ripper The Scarlet Letter) – and sometimes for bad reasons that were still quite clear, because they were wildly ambitious auteur visions no one knew how to market (Kathryn Bigelow’s hi-tech millennial answer to a snuff-film thriller, Strange Days). I started to love sifting apart these different categories of flop, and adopting the good ones as pets. This has always been a favourite sport among film nuts, and still is. The “it’s actually great” reappraisals of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) began the second it bombed. They’re brewing for Folie à Deux, just you wait.

Even truly bad flops are more compelling to think, read and write about than depressingly successful films that are also bad (hello, Kingsman). Those can encourage critics into self-serving, I-know-better-than-the-public takedowns, but some of the weirdest oddities out there have stuff to teach us.

You won’t find the American genre specialist John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning) resorting to scads of post-production digital effects if he can avoid it, because he saw the hell that his father Peter went through on the astonishingly ill-fated Ray Bradbury adaptation A Sound of Thunder (2005). In it, a prehistoric “time safari” goes wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the worst dinosaur effects you’ve ever seen, or with Ben Kingsley’s bouffant white wig and soul patch: the film’s unbelievable daftness emanates from one huge mishap. The budget crumbled when accounting fraud was exposed at its backers Franchise Pictures, and it broke the film in a thousand ways. Any aspiring filmmaker could study that cursed production and learn about the direst pitfalls of the business.

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Being drawn to flops also means admitting they have their artistic advantages. I’m confident that we wouldn’t have Fargo (1996), with its lacerating minimalism, if the Coen brothers hadn’t just gone belly-up with the exorbitant gamble of their super-stylised foray into period screwball, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). “It is true that we were pressured in this direction,” said Joel, the year Fargo came out. It’s their flattest film in its use of landscape, with the fewest sets; Hudsucker is the total opposite in visual terms, and when it failed, they did a handbrake turn.

I wouldn’t touch a frame of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), essentially a brilliant failure about failure, in which the defeated ambition of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Caden Cotard finds another synecdoche in the film’s box-office fate. I also love George Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City (1998) for all the ways it rebels against the adorable first film, converting Babe into a black sheep of a franchise single-handed, with no regard whatsoever for studio economics. Flops mustn’t all be treated like spilled milk. Good, bad, everything in between: in my book, they’re worth celebrating.

Tim Robey’s ‘Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops’ is published by Faber on 7 November