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.”
Rest assured, flop fanciers will find their red meat here. The pirate yarn Cutthroat Island (1995) cruised right into a $190 million loss (adjusted for inflation), with stars Geena Davis and Matthew Modine at the mercy of an explosion-obsessed director, Renny Harlin, who rebuilt and re-rebuilt whole stretches of Malta. The slapdash science-fiction thriller Supernova (2000) is, per Robey, a “textbook shambles,” wherein “everyone gets naked in deep space, some mutate, then most of them die.” Not even Francis Ford Coppola could save it.
In an earlier, transitional era for old-school studios, the woeful musical Doctor Dolittle (1967) featured a star (Rex Harrison) who supposedly refused “to have any other actors sing at him”; at least 1,500 animals to wrangle (including a chimp who took six months to learn how to fry bacon and eggs); an offended Brit’s attempt to blow up a dam built for the set; and the death knell for the road-show business model of exhibition. (It still got nominated for best picture. De gustibus.)
Over half of Robey’s selections date from the 1990s, which could be deemed either recency bias or the greater effects of firsthand trauma at the cinema. George Miller’s wonderful warped sequel Babe: Pig in the City (1998) seems to have scarred a college-age Robey: Farmer Hoggett is maimed a mere three minutes in.
The veteran critic does include at least a film per decade since the 1910s. But the list can get awkward for lovers of classical Hollywood, who probably couldn’t care less about the financial bona fides of certain films: the complicated and conflicting Freaks (1932), with its circus-star cast; Sylvia Scarlett (1935), starring a cross-dressing Katharine Hepburn; or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an American epic famously butchered in the edit in Orson Welles’s absence.
But Robey isn’t after a litany of dunks, fortunately. He freely raises his critical voice, giving Sorcerer (1977) its due for William Friedkin’s cold-sweat reimagining of The Wages of Fear’s nitroglycerin-truck death trips, rightly deeming it “some kind of deadly masterwork.” Of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)—a movie that seems to cause Lynch physical pain to recall—Robey observes that its one-on-one scenes are its best, not the set pieces, and, like an encouraging friend, offers that “Kenneth McMillan’s pustulant baron is genuinely revolting.” And he weaves a downright lovely thread from Howard Hawks’s sand-logged Land of the Pharaohs (1955) to the Egyptian simulacra and brutal folly depicted in Casino (1995): Scorsese had seen and adored the Hawks film early on.
That acute eye is helpful for anyone who might blanch at the body count among the flops: actors Gloria Swanson, defeated by Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1932), and Dan Aykroyd, faded after his willfully grotesque directorial debut, Nothing but Trouble (1991). Not to mention the felling of action-drama directors such as Peter Hyams (A Sound of Thunder, 2005) and Martin Brest (Gigli, 2003, which people should really just drop, and re-watch his 100 percent perfect Midnight Run, 1988).
Inevitably, Robey’s selection invites argument. It seems churlish to include the Coen brothers’ neo-screwball Art Deco curiosity The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)—“$25 million … spent on skyscrapers and quotation marks … missing a heartbeat”—especially in the same lineup as Terry Gilliam’s borderline criminal The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). What Robey calls the “prevailing flatness” of Speed Racer (2008)—the Matrix mavens’ exhilaratingly barmy rainbow-starburst live-action anime—is a gorgeous feature, not a bug. And why enumerate the faults of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) as a flop only to acknowledge its “greatness” as “vulnerable art”? (I highly recommend hosting a 35-mm. screening instead and watching audiences in awe.)
By the list’s end—now and forever, Cats—one is struck by a certain quaintness to our concept of the flop. Perhaps it’s a relic of an era when Hollywood was still so dominant in pop culture that its pratfalls made a satisfying crash (or … flop?). Now, as Robey notes, the secrecy of streamers and their penchant for loss-leader product complicates the whole endeavor. If a film flops in an infinite scroll, does it make a sound?
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor at Film Comment magazine
