If you’re planning a trip to the multiplex this week, chances are you’ll be watching a movie that a major studio has placed a huge bet on.
Studios often save their biggest swings for the end of the year, hoping for a massive hit to propel them through the leaner months at the box office in January and February. Every winter, film executives cross their fingers and toes and pray that their high-stakes gambles pay off, hoping to avoid the dreaded flop.
For decades now, the industry has done everything they can think of to predict what audiences want. But there’s no such thing as a safe gamble. Ambitious movies often lose enormous sums of money, and when they do, it’s usually followed by a round of gleeful mocking on social media and in the press.
This endless cycle fascinates Tim Robey, a writer and film critic who recently published a book called “Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops.” Robey joined The Show to talk about our enduring obsession with the elusive blockbuster.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: This book brought back for me is being a kid and opening the Washington Post in the morning, and they used to have on Mondays, I think it was, they would have this little box that showed how much, the top 10 box office movies from the weekend, and I remember sitting there and and like rooting for the movies that I liked to hit that elusive $100 million mark that, at the time, was considered kind of the marker of a blockbuster or a or a successful film. When did that idea in the popular consciousness of, like following the financial prowess of a movie, when did, when did that start? Where do we get that from?
TIM ROBEY: I think that's a really interesting question. I was trying to puzzle out exactly when it becomes a mainstream sport, if you like. My kind of read on it is that it's between the '60s and the '70s when that, when that starts to happen. The huge success of films like "The Godfather," "Jaws," "The Exorcist," everyone starts paying attention to how well those films have done, how much money they've taken.
Everyone then becomes aware of the huge budgets that are being spent on then some of the films by those same filmmakers, something like "Apocalypse Now." Coppola's, you know, a very expensive and, and over budget and over schedule film that he spent about three years making, and the press were predicting that that was going to be a huge flop. They were calling it “Apocalypse When,” “Apocalypse Later.” There was a lot of speculation that film was going to do very badly, and it didn't in the end, it redeemed itself because everyone kind of really went for it.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, well, and it's such an interesting thing because we love hubris. We love the idea that a movie might fail, almost it seems like more sometimes than the idea that an artistic vision might succeed, and this story, I think, is a kind of a testament to how relevant artists still are.
I mean, you know, we're, we're in a time when there's all this panic about artificial intelligence and how that's going to be used to make movies and then as you write about also, movie studios, since 2008, have been characterized by what you call a “nervous unoriginality.”
ROBEY: Yeah, I do agree and it's interesting that you bring up 2008 when there was this sudden moment when Hollywood realized it could print money with superheroes, essentially, after the success of, of "Iron Man." And that had a bad impact on two of the films that I include in the, in the book from that year. One of them is "Speed Racer," which was released at exactly the same time as "Iron Man" and was absolutely taken apart at the box office by "Iron Man." And it was the Wakowskis trying something new, trying to widen their appeal, which didn't pay off for them.
DINGMAN: That's kind of interesting too, if I, if I may, Tim, because the Waakowskis were known for "The Matrix," which was a certified blockbuster and which, if I'm not mistaken, was their own original concept, whereas Speed Racer was an adaptation.
ROBEY: That's right. But the other, the other person affected by this sudden shift, and of course 2008 was when the financial crisis landed, which made Hollywood much more careful, if you look at the career of Charlie Kaufman. So, I include "Synecdoche, New York," his, his great directorial debut in my book. It's one of the, it's probably the lowest budget film in the book, but it still cost $20 million and it didn't have a hope of recouping that. It took about $4 million worldwide, 4.5 million, and Charlie Kaufman really thinks that that film's failure, sort of stalled his career in a very unfortunate way, and this is a man who'd just won an Oscar for the screenplay of "Eternal Sunshine." He was a very established and respected artist within Hollywood. He'd written an adaptation and being John Malkovich and been nominated for Oscars for those. And he really thinks that the economic downturn and the sudden thriving of Marvel just created this whole new climate in Hollywood where his kind of movie became impossible to get off the ground.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but you know, it's interesting too because there are other directors who have hitched their wagons to things you might have thought were safe bets and met a similar fate. One of the pretty spectacular failures that you talk about in the book is the sequel to "Speed," "Speed 2."
ROBEY: That's true. Speed on a cruise ship just doesn't make sense. As soon as Keanu Reeves read it, he just didn't think it made sense and didn't want to do it. So that's why he refused to do that movie. He was like, he didn't understand why it was on a cruise ship. And it is really hard to know what they were thinking.
DINGMAN: Well, and, and for me that goes back to this idea of for better or for worse, kind of the primacy of something as simple as story and an individual, like a screenwriter, because it's kind of fascinating when you think about it, as you've just laid out, a relatively rudimentary analysis of something like "Speed 2" would seem to suggest that this movie is destined to fail.
ROBEY: It totally did, yeah, and I think part of that was because of the haste with which they rushed it out. There was a slot in the summer schedules that 20th Century Fox really wanted to fill, which had just been vacated by "Titanic," right, which was taking way too long to film, and all the major studios need to have at least one big summer blockbuster that's just going to kind of ring the tills.
So, they were like, “We're going to, it's going to have to be 'Speed 2.' We're going to have to just crack on with it. We know the script's not really ready.” Because all the, all the film had was a, the finale had a climax with the cruise ship, you know, crunching into that key at the end, but they had to kind of retrofit everything else to get there, so they had to cook up this whole plot, which is very silly, and then also write the whole new character played by Jason Patric into the story.
DINGMAN: But there again, the context of that is so fascinating because as you pointed out, the reason that this all happened is because "Titanic" had to be moved, and in Titanic, you have a movie that on paper, enormous budget, director, meticulously committed to authenticity and maintaining the integrity of his vision. Those are some of the symptoms of a flop, and yet, in choosing to honor that, that studio was rewarded with a movie that for a while, was the highest grossing film of all time and it wasn't close.
ROBEY: You're absolutely right. Titanic was predicted to be the biggest flop of all time.
DINGMAN: So it feels to me like one of the things we're talking about here that humans are drawn to, particularly in our storytelling, whether we like to admit it or not, is uncertainty. And you know, we look at the stories that are trickling out about a certain film and we say like, “Oh that movie is gonna be huge.” And then it fails, and we love the fact that we're so surprised at the failure and and the inverse is also true.
I mean, one of the things that comes across so much in this book is how much reverence and love you have for these movies that commercially, maybe, were considered failures and terrified the studios, but am I right that, as a movie fan, you have a love for the flop?
ROBEY: I absolutely do, yeah. But what about all the other movies that we used to go and see as well? My particular pet favorite, kind of mid-budget thrillers from the 1990s. You know, there's kind of movies starring, you know, Kurt Russell or Michael Douglas, that cost $30 or $40 million and there were, you know, there would be one or two of those every year. I don't think they're getting made and if you lose that middle to the industry, then what, what have you got? You've got, kind of huge, kind of pantomime entertainments, and maybe small indies. But, we need the middle. We need the middle back, I think.
DINGMAN: Yeah, you know, it's like we're so fixated on the promise of the giant hit or the promise of mocking the giant failure that it's like we've forgotten about the appeal of the movie that seems like a pretty safe bet to deliver a very high quality experience. We're somehow not as interested in that anymore.
ROBEY: Yeah, and I miss films that just sort of creep up on you or come along and suddenly it's in the cinema and you haven't heard of it, but you kind of, take a chance on it, you know, people just don't do that anymore. I think every, every film that comes along is so heavily pre-sold, pre-hyped, and it's sort of a done deal, except when they assume it's a done deal and it really isn't a done deal after all.
