“Flop”: the word sounds dismal, a wet fish. Films flop—sometimes, as in the case of the recent Joker: Folie à Deux, dramatically. Should we care? Isn’t it vulgar to focus on money rather than art? Martin Scorsese thinks it’s “repulsive”. Since the 1980s, he told an audience in 2022, “The emphasis is on numbers, cost, the opening weekend, how much it made in the USA, how much it made in England, how much it made in Asia, how much it made in the entire world... As a filmmaker, and as a person who can’t imagine life without cinema, I always find it really insulting.”
Scorsese has a point. Flops are often seen as jokes (think Gene Kelly’s Hello, Dolly! or Elaine May’s Ishtar), proof of directorial egotism and overreach (Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate) or the freakonomics that motor the Hollywood system (Eddie Murphy was paid $20m for his role in The Adventures of Pluto Nash—around one fifth of the film’s entire budget). Tim Robey, in his hugely entertaining new book Box Office Poison, argues that such flops can also have rich afterlives. Some get “reappropriated after the event as camp treats”. Others become “monuments to studio hubris”. A few have the ability “to electrify decades later for reasons of genuine artistry”.
Flops, Robey believes, are stories overflowing with the kind of drama—“Escalating budgets. Clashing egos. Acts of God”—to make studio bosses salivate with glee. DW Griffith, riding high after the success of The Birth of a Nation (1915), followed up with Intolerance (1916), an even more ambitious fable that encompassed the fall of Babylon, ancient Judea, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and striking mill workers in modern America. Cinemas that wanted to screen it had to be specially decorated and employ a travelling orchestra. Critics were enthusiastic, audiences elusive. In a letter to the film’s star, Lillian Gish, Griffith described “wandering through the darkened theatres, barking his shins on the empty seats”.
Films can suffer from too much money. Thousands of bored and sun-blasted Egyptian extras, asked to play quarry slaves in Howard Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs (1955), rose up in song: “Fuck Warner Brothers!” The production of Richard Fleischer’s charmless Doctor Doolittle (1967) recruited trainers to spend six months teaching a chimpanzee to fry bacon and eggs, and built a concrete dam so environmentally reckless that a 22-year-old Ranulph Fiennes tried to blow it up with a gas bomb.
Some flops pay the price for stunted budgets. Peter Hyams’s 2005 science thriller A Sound of Thunder, widely panned for its distinctly unthrilling special effects, was bankrolled by an independent production company called Franchise Pictures that specialised in star vehicles which major studios had passed on. To skimp on cost, it used old software and subcontracted work to India and Hong Kong. The FX industry relies on high-pressure but low-paid labour that can lead to horrors such as Tom Hooper’s Cats (2019), in which the humanoid felines were so weird that the garish visuals had to be redone following the film’s premiere.
Robey describes flops as Hollywood’s “weirdos, outcasts, misfits, freaks” and his most memorable chapter indeed concerns Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). The director drew on his past life as a runaway teenager who had joined a circus for this revenge drama featuring real-life dwarves, Siamese twins and bearded ladies. The film was banned in Atlanta for breaching the city’s decency laws. A woman tried to sue MGM, claiming that watching it had caused her to miscarry. The studio reduced its length from 90 to barely 60 minutes. In the UK it was banned for nearly 30 years. These days, it’s celebrated as a Depression-era social allegory that also has a bold anti-eugenics message.
What happens when a movie flops? Some directors are self-critical (“I don’t think it’s a silk purse,” said David Lynch of Dune, “I know it’s a sow’s ear”). Spleen is vented: Eric Idle damned Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (“Apart from boarding school, it’s probably one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever been through in my life”). Spirits are crushed (Browning became a recluse). Even the fear of failure can madden a filmmaker (John McTiernan was jailed after hiring a sleazy private investigator to wiretap the producer on Rollerball). Only a few benefit (the Coen brothers sensibly returned to making smaller-scale films after The Hudsucker Proxy performed poorly).
Do flops have a future? They rely on inflated budgets, but merchandise-orientated blockbusters seem to be in decline. While transparent box-office information is needed for a film to be deemed a flop, modern-day streaming companies, even though they greedily harvest data about their audiences’ viewing habits, refuse to share meaningful numbers about the films they release. I wonder if Scorsese, who loves film history, will ever find himself feeling nostalgic for the golden, now-fading era of flops.
