Twitch-O-Meter: Favorites failing financially??

Some extra explanation first.
The list below only contains movies which really surprised me by being financially unsuccessful. A movie like “Heaven’s Gate” won’t be appearing in it, because even though it has a growing fanbase it’s still best known for ruining the United Artists studio. So that one would be too bloody obvious. Same with “Cleopatra”, “Final Fantasy” and others like that.

No, what I’m aiming for are the titles which are nowadays generally agreed to be crowdpleasers, yet didn’t exactly launch like that. So here goes!


Honorable Mention:
Without a doubt I declare that ”The Empire Strikes Back” is the best Star Wars movie ever made. And there is a very good reason why it is an honorable mention and not in the list itself: it actually made money! Kazillions, to be exact.

But if you look at all of the Star Wars movies together, you’ll notice something odd.
Even though this is the most revered one of the lot it bafflingly is also the lowest grossing of them! Account for inflation all you like, it will still be way behind its two brothers and (more irritatingly) its three screaming nephews.
Unimaginable for me, as this movie is the closest I ever came to experiencing religion as a teenager…


Number 5:
If you owned a micro-computer in the eighties you had also seen the movie ”Tron”. A programmer sucked into a computer, having to play videogames to safe his life? Awesome!!!

Even though the “real world” parts look ever so much dated these days, the virtual world described in the movie is a marvel. The computer renderings, by a super-computer (tm) no less, can nowadays be calculated by any laptop, but in 1982 we had never before seen computer graphics of this scale. Designer Syd Mead did brilliant work by using the weaknesses of the available technology to his advantage. Photo-reality was still impossible to do so he made a world which looked VERY fake on purpose. Syd’s designs have never been copied and the whole look of the film is still unique to this day.
So I always have thought of this film fondly, and consider it a major special-effects benchmark. For one thing it opened the eyes of many people about what was going to be possible with computers in general. Unfortunately its financial failure also shut the eyes of many studios for what they had created…

Judging by its crummy box-office in the cinema, most people presumably saw it on video or on television. Although on paper it’s a “break-even”, this movie is from the time when studios were actually inflating the revenues for prestige purposes (the tax bill on “E.T.” would change all of that soon...).
The truth is “Tron” was far more expensive than the 17 Million USD production cost quoted, and the fact that no sequel was made even though this would have been a VERY recognizable franchise sort of says enough.


Number 4:
I’ve seen “The Blues Brothers” four times in the cinema, and always the audience was happy with it. Also, every subsequent visit there were more people in the audience! The last time was eight years after its original release, at a local cinema, and they had to turn people away. And this was even after it had already been on television, and everyone owned a videorecorder at home! No mean feat considering it’s a half-musical about ex-convicts trying to save an orphanage, based, hell, DEPENDANT on a specific location which doesn’t mean much to people who aren’t living there.

But the movie rocks, simple as that. The music was stellar (I keep seeing that soundtrack pop up in people’s collections), Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi played to their strengths for a change, the stunts were cool, the cinematography was grimy and the pacing was lazy. And it just all clicks, this movie has a flow of its own. Watch the abysmal sequel to see how NOT to do it.

So yes, in time it did make its money back but it had a hell of a bad start initially, allegedly making back less than a quarter of its production costs in the first month. Ouch! The fact that it later got as successful as it did was maybe because… it was on a mission from God?


Number 3:
I’ve mentioned television a couple of times already,but make no mistake: when Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” was on the telly you stayed home. It was an event.
This might just be the most epic of all westerns ever, regardless of how many extras were used or on how small a scale the story actually takes place. Every second of this movie carries weight, an effect heightened by the brilliant camera work and, well, need I mention Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack? Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards are allI bad-asses in this and the total result just screams classic!

So I was stunned to hear this movie was a dud on release. People were apparently tiring of spaghetti westerns in its home country of Italy, and the many references to other westerns (put in by fellow scriptwriter Dario Argento) went unnoticed or were seen as unnecessarily academic. Again, reissues have made plenty money. The film sort of created its own legend, and rightfully so, but it feels downright strange that it didn’t start like one.


Number 2:
“Blade Runner”. You might have heard about this one: detective needs to stop a group of artificially created humanoids wreaking havoc through a future version of Los Angeles. And a good many people, including me, are anxiously awaiting the upcoming ultra-release on DVD.

Ridley Scott’s brilliant adaptation of the Philip K.Dick novella “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” might just be the most influential science fiction movie of the eighties. Syd Mead was once again responsible for the way the world looked, but unlike “Tron” these designs have been extensively copied in hundreds of movies since (maybe even more than Giger’s creature design for “Alien”, that other Ridley Scott movie).
Harrison Ford played pleasantly against type but Rutger Hauer had his best role ever and knocked it out of the park!

All in all it’s a remarkably timeless movie, it really hasn’t aged a bit since its release. And the special effects still hold up after 25 years. Stunning stuff.

But it was a very expensive movie to make and it only made back 27 million USD on initial release, way too little to recoup its costs.


Number 1:
If there is ONE title I associate with Disney it’s “Bambi”. In fact this film is so well known its very name has become an adjective and a verb! The very mention will conjure up saccharine images of young animals playing and it’s considered to be the ultimate children’s movie.
Having re-seen it recently on DVD, I find the kiddie-reputation of Bambi too belittling. People often forget Bambi is pretty much grown up for the latter half of the movie, and experiences sex, death and parenthood. Several animals die on-screen, shotguns are fired into rabbit-holes, and dogs and fire can make this movie quite the nightmare for the little ones. Which child didn’t lose part of its innocence when the realization hit about what exactly happened to Bambi’s mother?
Technically it’s a marvel too, the very best that can be done using ‘mere’ handwork. And it’s been a beloved classic for over sixty years now!

So why is it on this list? Because, believe it or not, when it was released in 1943 it did not do enough business to be considered a success. It didn’t quite break the studio like Fantasia almost did, but it had been a very expensive movie which had been over 5 years in the making, and during the Second World War there wasn’t really an overseas market to sell tickets on, while the domestic economy wasn’t too dandy either…


Thus ends the list, please feel free to tell me which ones I shamefully missed!