The indignity of the Hollywood flop: nobody goes to the movie when it comes out, but people can’t stop talking about it. Schadenfreude plus spectacle remains an irresistible formula for many movie fans, as the online pile-ons for Megalopolis and Joker: Folie à Deux recently demonstrated. In Box Office Poison, Tim Robey curates his own catalogue of flops, 26 movies that underperformed and—in their own special, forehead-smacking ways—overdelivered.
It’s more than a matter of pointing a finger and laughing for Robey, who starts each chapter with the film’s box-office total. The veteran critic for The Telegraph is merciless with one flop criterion: financial loss, achieved (if that’s the word) by all of these films but not, for example, by Waterworld (which apparently squeaked into the black). Then the chronicles begin: disastrous shoots, misbegotten creative intentions, or both, resulting in “camp treats, monuments to studio hubris, or genuine artistry misunderstood or radical or ahead of its time.”
