By James David Patrick
Late last year, I highlighted five legendary box office bombs that needed a PR makeover. These movies fail for many reasons, but the most basic explanation is that they failed to find their audience while everyone was paying attention.
The lucky failures go on to become cult hits, championed by small but loyal factions of moviegoers. They pop up at repertory theaters and festivals, and their filmmakers benefit from adulation if not direct financial gains.
Other movies just disappear. I picked five more money pits that I don’t think should go quietly into the night, that should be watched and appreciated for what they are—rather than the massive “misfires” they became. Success comes in all forms and in Hollywood, unfortunately, the only line that matters is box office gross. Let’s do our part in keeping these movies relevant by adding them to the tops of our queues.
Blackhat (Michael Mann, 2015)
It wouldn’t be hard to make a case for Michael Mann as one of the most consistently excellent American filmmakers of the last forty years. Manhunter (1986), Thief (1981), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992) would each be the best film on almost any director’s resume. Unfortunately, general audiences don’t recognize his name as a box office draw in the same way as a Scorsese and a Tarantino. The sad fact is that since the New Hollywood days of the 1970s directors have trended downward as a marketable asset.
Through no fault of his own, Mann’s name appears multiple times on lists of major box office disasters. 2001’s Muhammed Ali bio-pic Ali, which garnered acting Oscar nominations for Will Smith and Jon Voight, wound up putting Columbia Pictures (who backed the film with a major Christmas marketing campaign) $100 million in the red. As a film that received plenty of critical accolades and two Academy nominations, it shouldn’t really need a public relations boost. Instead, I wanted to turn everyone’s attentions to Mann’s other box office blight – Blackhat (2015).
In January of 2015, Deadline ran a story by Anthony D’Allesandro called “Legendary’s Michael Mann Pic ‘Blackhat’: What the Hell Happened?” Even after Ali (which, to be fair, was outside the director’s special oeuvre), no one expected a failure of this magnitude from Mann. With the benefit of some hindsight, however, we can put together a clear path to the film’s financial deficit. American Sniper dominated the box office while Blackhat, with its big-name star and director, floundered on opening weekend. The film, about a cyber-criminal (Chris Hemsworth) released from prison to help American and Chinese authorities track down a dangerous hacker that had run amuck in trading markets and Chinese power grids, didn’t find its audience… or any audience for that matter.
D’Allesandro points fingers at the Universal marketing team, which chose to embellish the film’s nominal sex, guns, and explosions because they couldn’t find an alluring angle for a thoughtful, twisty thriller about a hi-tech manhunt. Mann’s greatest asset as a filmmaker is his poignant exploration of professional (often criminal) minutiae. In Blackhat, he turned that focused attention to the pursuit of cyber-anarchists, which undoubtedly seemed like an impossible sell for its studio.
Foregrounding sexy times and action would be a reasonable enticement to get butts in theater seats, but in a show business economy that over-relies on a big opening box office and fickle Cinema Scores (the survey of exiting filmgoers on opening night) to gauge future success, these bait-and-switch tactics often have long-lasting ramifications. The disappointed audience pulled into the theater for pulp titillation contributed to the film’s C- Cinema Score. The adult viewers that would have appreciated the more mature, analytical tone of the film ignored Blackhat while Universal chased a young audience by misdirecting the marketing campaign and flaunting Chris “Thor” Hemsworth’s Marvel caché.
With its opening weekend dominated by the success of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Blackhat desperately needed word-of-mouth to ignite viewer interest during its subsequent weeks. The viewers that would have recommended Blackhat didn’t see it, thus leaving Michael Mann’s excellent film without an audience, a final tally of only $20 million, and the unfair stigma of being the biggest box office debacle of 2015. Some films take time to become a success story. After seven years, it’s time Blackhat sussed out its redemption.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E (Guy Ritchie, 2015)
While we’re on the subject of 2015 and oddly underappreciated directors, let’s pause to talk about Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the movie that aborted what could and should have been a stylish and potentially lucrative spy franchise.
In 2015 theatrical audiences were treated to a glut of five big budget clandestine affairs. These included the Melissa McCarthy comedy Spy, Kingsman: The Secret Service, James Bond in Spectre, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and finally Guy Ritchie’s update of the 1960s TV show with The Man from U.N.C.L.E. starring Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, and Alicia Vikander. And what if I told you that the most entertaining movie out of all of them was the TV series Guy Ritchie dusted off for the 21st century? Some measure of shock and/or disbelief, I imagine, because The Man from U.N.C.L.E. finished in 63rd place for the year – trailing the next place spy-flick (Spy) by more than $65 million. As a result, Ritchie’s film appears on many Hollywood disaster lists.
It didn’t help matters that Warner Bros. dropped The Man from U.N.C.L.E. into theaters the week after Mission: Impossible’s opening, the same week that Straight Outta Compton took everybody by surprise with an unfathomable $84 million opening. Part bad luck, part really bad planning.
Set in 1963, the height of the cold war, a professional thief-turned-C.I.A.-agent Napoloeon Solo (Cavill), a Nazi-turned-American scientist’s daughter (Vikander), and a KGB agent (Hammer) must work together, under the control of MI6 operative Alexander Waverly (Hugh Grant) to thwart the development and acquisition of a nuclear bomb by a leftover Nazi faction.
Ritchie’s kinetic camera turned the old TV property into a swinging, fashion-forward actioner with a focus on character and style rather than stunt and spectacle. And I don’t mean to say that it lacked its share of elaborate action set pieces—let’s be real—this is still a Guy Ritchie movie. Car and motorcycle chases, brutal fist fights, and tactical espionage all factor into this production, but in between action beats, the script (written by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram) gives Cavill, Hammer, and Vikander time to goof off, drink up, and engage in interpersonal tête-à-tête as each character tries to snuff out the others’ true motivations.
The quintessential U.N.C.L.E. scene features Napoleon Solo casually enjoying a mid-mission French sack lunch he finds in a cargo truck while Kuryakin confronts hordes of attackers. Only when he’s reluctantly concluded his impromptu meal does he re-engage the enemy to rescue his partner. Style, class, comedic timing, and a swinging score from Daniel Pemberton made this a perfect franchise launch. The stars wanted it. The director wanted it. Unfortunately, audiences turned a cold (war) shoulder.
Sahara (Breck Eisner, 2005)
The Sahara is the world’s largest hot desert, covering 3.5 million square miles in Northern Africa. It is also a black hole into which four production companies combined to dump $160 million including, among other questionable activities, line-itemized bribes to the Moroccan government. 10 screenwriters (six of which don’t even receive credit) costing $4 million had a hand in adapting Clive Cussler’s novel Sahara. An excised 46-second action sequence cost upwards of $2 million to shoot. It endured years of lawsuits (resulting in over $20 million in legal fees) brought about by Cussler, who claimed he had been denied his contractually obligated rights to “absolute control” over the adaptation – what was to have been the first in a series of James Bond-inspired Dirk Pitt adventures… if this one hadn’t lost more than $80 million. ($80 million is all they admitted.)
Matthew McConaughey stars as Pitt, a treasure hunter who finds a confederate coin in the Niger river, a clue that he believes will lead him to the long-lost CSS Texas, the transport in charge of secreting away the last of the Confederacy’s gold. A simple but outlandish premise that Sahara overbakes by the closing credits.
The critics were nearly united in proclaiming the movie to be “preposterous” and “mindless.” They’re not wrong. And yet there’s just something about this cast and this scenario that works exactly as it should. Popcorn fodder for those seeking pure adventure escapism. It starts with the rapport between McConaughey and sidekick Steve Zahn. Penelope Cruz is also game for an adventure, but Zahn’s the glue that holds everything together. William H. Macy, Delroy Lindo, Rainn Wilson, Glynn Turman, and Lambert Wilson round out the supporting cast, and everyone, top to bottom, seems to be making the same absurd movie. Part intentional adventure serial, à la Raiders of the Lost Ark, and part gonzo travelogue with your laid-back host Matthew McConaughey.
The Postman (Kevin Costner, 1997)
Don’t you know that the postman always delivers? It’s right there in the USPS motto… “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” – even in a post-apocalyptic neo-Western disestablished United States in the near future of… 2013… where war and plague have eradicated most technology and displaced population centers.
The author of the novel, David Brin, aimed for more Field of Dreams than Mad Max – a sentiment that early screenwriters discarded in favor of dystopian disillusionment. When Kevin Costner signed on to direct, he discarded the old screenplay and re-adapted the novel with screenwriter Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale, 2001). Much to Brin’s delight, Costner wanted to return the focus to the small miracles of everyday life.
After two disastrous test screenings, Costner refused Warner Bros. requests to edit the film down from its 177-minute runtime. As these production disagreements tend to do, word spread around town about The Postman’s troubled post-production, and by the time critics and audiences had a chance to see the film, most opinions had already been formed. Costner’s massively silly post-apocalyptic jingoist vanity project would get its comeuppance. As I mentioned in my first list of big budget bombs regarding Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, critics love a good pre-ordained sentence that puts Hollywood excess in the gallows. Sure, The Postman probably shouldn’t have been three hours long… and sure—it’s a folly to spend $80 million on a rather trivial post-apocalyptic epic long on sentimentality and short on action (until the third act at least). But all that said, Costner’s film became not exactly something great, but something unique and eccentric in its approach to epic filmmaking.
Through the first hour, The Postman assaults the viewer with a bleak vision of America run by an ersatz dictatorship that eerily predicts some of the recent political radicalism. Costner plays a simple actor that escapes servitude and wanders the landscape in search of purpose, looking for a new part to play in life. When he discovers a postal van with a skeleton at the helm, he dons the uniform and turns himself into a mail carrier, a tether to past comforts thought erased. He becomes an idol representing the past and a hopeful future.
Costner’s biggest mistake, perhaps, was casting himself rather than giving the role to someone without the Hollywood baggage of similar epics like the acclaimed Dances with Wolves and the derided Waterworld. There’s subtle weirdness and heavy-handed gestures and moments of rah rah undying American Spirit in the face of impenetrably corrupt despotism. No matter your ultimate opinion on The Postman, you’ll have a hard time denying its attraction as an entertaining curiosity. Costner aimed for the moon and hit Mars.
Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998)
Putting Beloved into any sort of reasonable market context comes with a cost. The cost is marginalizing the immense cultural importance of Toni Morrison’s 1987 supernatural novel by breaking its value down into a commodity that must be marketed and sold to a broad audience, one that could sink so that The Waterboy could swim. (We’ll get back to that.) Morrison’s novel wields ghosts and horrific imagery like Henry James’ Turn of the Screw – to incite depths of emotion rather than traditional fear. The ghosts in Beloved convey the fractured psychological state of an ex-slave (Oprah Winfrey) in the wake of the Civil War. The bankability of such a movie would always rely upon the end-of-year awards ceremonies. People must be told to see “important” films. It doesn’t always come naturally.
Oprah purchased the rights to Toni Morrison’s novel upon its release in 1987, before it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. She earnestly began the push to get the book on the big screen almost a decade later. She said about Morrison’s book, “…never before had I seen a piece of work that allowed you to go into the interior of a person’s spirit, to understand what slavery did to their soul.” She also said that she believed she had been put on earth to make this movie. She tabbed Jonathan Demme, off two massive successes with Philadelphia (1993) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to direct. His regular collaborator Tak Fujimoto would act as DP. Demme said that during production every actor – Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandiwe Newton – perfectly inhabited their roles. Everything seemed to be falling into place.
But this was a Disney production, a prestige production, under the control of Touchstone Pictures. Destined to win awards and critical platitudes. The budget ballooned to $80 million. A sure investment turned itself into a risky endeavor. Despite the supernatural element, Beloved was not a genre film – it was an emotional arthouse drama dressed up in Disney and Oprah gloss. Though littered with impressive period detail and a talented cast, I struggle to see where Beloved spent so much money – nor how they expected to earn that money back, even with the almost guaranteed push from award-season nominations.
Beloved hit theaters on October 16th, 1998, but couldn’t do better than 5th place for the weekend, bested by new releases Practical Magic and Bride of Chucky. Oprah later claimed that being beaten by “something called Chucky” represented the lowest point in her career and propelled her into a major depression. The sad tale of Beloved doesn’t exactly end there. Despite the lower overall box office, Beloved did very well per theater, making more per booking than any other movie during its opening weekend. But Disney didn’t increase its visibility, nor did it show any deference to the film as an important work of cinema. After the fourth week, Disney yanked it so that it could more widely distribute Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy – with the promise that Demme’s film would return at the end of the year to help generate Oscar buzz. It didn’t return until March 5th of 1999 and played in only 206 venues. Despite some very vocal supporters such as Roger Ebert, Beloved earned only one Oscar nomination for Costume Design and none for its stellar cast.
In 2013, Winfrey questioned whether she did the film a disservice by not making it more commercial. A sentiment that Ebert answered in his glowing review back in 1998. He said some of its audience would not like the film because “it does not provide the kind of easy lift at the end that they might expect. Sethe’s tragic story is the kind where the only happy ending is that it is over.”
Which brings us back to the original conditions of the film’s oversized budget. To do Toni Morrison’s book justice, to make the right movie, Oprah and Jonathan Demme could not make a commercially viable film palatable to a broad audience. They made the movie that they needed to make, that Oprah wanted to make with every fiber of her being. The need to do right by Toni Morrison likely consumed any fiscal responsibility. On top of that, Disney did not properly support the film that the filmmakers had to make. In 2022 they continue to dissuade viewers. Their resistance to providing the film materials for distribution prevents prestige home video companies like Criterion from releasing Beloved to a new, more receptive audience. They’ve tucked it away in their vault, leaving us with only an old DVD release. It’s up to us to make sure that Beloved continues to be seen.
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.