The 10 greatest movies to bomb at the box office
It’s a harsh reality of the movie business that making a quality film doesn’t always guarantee success. In fact, there are countless superb movies over the years that have gone down in flames at the box office, for a host of reasons.
Sometimes, a fantastic film is released at the wrong time, either because of direct competition at the box office or real-life events working against it. In other cases, a film is ahead of its time, and audiences don’t catch up for years—or even decades.
For this list of the ten greatest movies to ever bomb at the box office, we decided to veto a few obvious older contenders. Citizen Kane and It’s A Wonderful Life struggled upon their release but are now indelible parts of cinema culture, so we felt they could safely be left off the list.
The ten we’ve chosen run the gamut of pictures now hailed as classics to lesser-known movies which never quite got the recognition they deserved. Enjoy.
10 great movies that bombed at the box office:
10. Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)
It’s not often that the music from a film becomes infinitely more famous than the film itself – but that’s precisely what happened with Danny Boyle’s criminally underrated 2007 sci-fi thriller Sunshine. Composer John Murphy knocked it out of the park with his tracks ‘Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)’ and ‘Kaneda’s Death Pt. 2 (Adagio in D Minor)’ so hard that they have since been used in countless trailers, adverts, movies, and even reality shows. It’s a strange feeling to have the hairs on your arm stand on end when you’re watching Love Island, and you hear those familiar stirring notes, but here we are.
Boyle’s movie is just as great as Murphy’s score, though, and it’s a shame it only made $34million worldwide upon release. It performed particularly poorly in the US, where it only cobbled together less than $4m. It’s tempting to wonder if it would stand a better chance of working if it was released today, purely because so many cast members have gone on to huge stardom. Do you mean to tell me you wouldn’t rush to see a sci-fi thriller starring Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, and Hiroyuki Sanada in 2024? Of course, you would.
9. A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998)
In 1998, a neo-noir thriller set in small-town rural Minnesota was released in cinemas. It featured a cast of regular people forced into violent situations, a healthy dose of quirky humour, and an off-kilter vibe. It even received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards and was beloved by critics. Amazingly, the film we’re describing isn’t the Coen brothers’ superlative Fargo; it’s their good buddy Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, which came along two years after the Coens’ Oscar-winning black comedy.
Sadly, upon its release, A Simple Plan may have suffered from comparisons to Fargo, and it only managed to gross $16m on a budget of $17m. It’s a real bummer, too, because the film is arguably Raimi’s best. It’s a million miles away from the zany comedy, horror, and superhero pictures he’s become known for, showcasing a director who could turn his hand to different genres. The film is extremely low-key yet establishes a true sense of dread throughout, and the cast is uniformly superb, especially Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda. A hidden classic.
8. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
Maverick Australian helmer Andrew Dominik doesn’t direct very often, but when he does, you can put money on him making something iconoclastic and unique. His Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde stirred up plenty of controversy and angered a lot of people, while his excellent pulpy crime tale Killing Them Softly mostly disappeared without a trace in 2012. It was with the lengthily-titled The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford that he made a genuine modern classic, though, and nobody went to see it.
To be fair, a 160-minute revisionist western with an unwieldy title was probably a tough sell in September 2007, even if it did star Brad Pitt. It made $15m worldwide, which was around half of its budget, despite receiving glowing reviews across the board and a host of Academy Award nominations. Watching the film in all its elegiac glory is a wonderful experience, though, as you find yourself being hypnotised by Roger Deakins’ cinematography, as well as Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ haunting score. To this day, we still quote one of Pitt’s lines from the film in everyday conversation: “Mercy, them’s good eatin.'”
7. Warrior (Gavin O’ Connor, 2011)
In 2011, Tom Hardy was not quite the movie star he would become later in the decade. At that point, he had come to wider attention in 2008 with his incendiary turn in Bronson and followed that up with supporting roles in Inception and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Still, Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior was his first attempt at a leading man part, even if it was a two-hander with Australian actor Joel Edgerton. The movie may have preceded the increasing cultural ubiquity of UFC by a few years, too, which probably explains why this Mixed Martial Arts drama failed to pound the box office into submission.
As a sporting family drama, though, Warrior is as good as it gets in the modern era. Hardy’s charisma and physicality practically leap off the screen, and the scenes he and Edgerton share with estranged father Nick Nolte are true heart-wrenchers. Nolte was nominated for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the Oscars, and the film has gathered a cult following over the years, which is nice, but we still wish it had gotten a fair shake when it was first released.
6. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
In its initial cinema run at the end of October 2001, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko grossed a paltry $517,375. Considering the world was barely six weeks removed from 9/11, audiences may have been put off by the trailer, which featured a terrifying plane crash. Thankfully, the movie was eventually re-released and became a bigger hit on home video, making around $17.5m in total. The surreal and mind-bending Darko – which introduced most audiences to Jake Gyllenhaal – was unlikely to ever be a true mainstream hit, but it would definitely have fared better had real-life circumstances been different.
If anything, Darko’s failure at the box office and subsequent discovery at home may have helped it cement its status as the ultimate cult film. Fans loved to analyse every frame of the movie, poring over every allusion to time travel or parallel universes within this story of a teenage boy experiencing visions of a guy in a sinister rabbit costume telling him the world is coming to an end. Amusingly, Gyllenhaal wrote a foreword to a book about the film in 2003 and claimed he still didn’t understand it. However, he felt like it was never meant to be fully understood, and that’s half the fun.
5. The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
If there was a platonic ideal of a great movie bombing at the box office, it’s The Shawshank Redemption. Frank Darabont’s stunning prison drama only grossed $16m during its original theatrical engagement in 1994, but after it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, it was re-released. That increased the take to $73.3m, more than enough to make the $25m picture a hit. It then became one of the most beloved films of modern times on home video, and to this day, countless people list it as one of their favourites of all time.
What is it about Shawshank that people love so much, though? Well, ultimately, the film is an uplifting story of the friendship between two grown men—and that’s pretty rare in cinema. The first time around, people may have been put off by the prison setting or some of the story’s darker elements. There may have simply been too much competition at the time from the likes of Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. But when they returned to the film and discovered how much they loved Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freeman’s ‘Red’ Redding, its status as a classic was set in stone forever.
4. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Now we’re entering a significant year in the history of great films which died a death at the box office. In the summer of 1982, the following films were released: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Rocky III, Conan the Barbarian, Tron, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and Poltergeist. This was a crazy log jam of quality motion pictures, so some had to suffer. Unfortunately, two films, which are now seen as science fiction classics, were also released that summer and suffered for it.
The first was John Carpenter’s The Thing, which wasn’t only a financial dud upon release but was also torn apart by critics. Some claimed it was little more than an excuse for Carpenter to throw some disgusting creature effects up on screen; others accused it of being a boring, nihilistic mess with characters who only existed to meet increasingly gruesome ends. Of course, the film is now regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi horrors ever made, and many fans even think it’s Carpenter’s best film. We wouldn’t go quite that far – it’s Halloween for us – but there’s no doubt The Thing deserved better than its fate in ’82.
3. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
The second stone-cold sci-fi masterpiece to fare poorly at the 1982 box office was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. While it performed respectably – $41.8m on a budget of $30m – it paled in comparison to Scott’s previous sci-fi masterpiece Alien, which made $188m on a budget of less than $11m. Blade Runner undoubtedly suffered in a similar way to The Thing in that it was released into a ludicrously crowded marketplace. However, considering that it had a similar bleak tone to Carpenter’s picture, it appears that audiences were simply gravitating toward more upbeat movies at that time, such as E.T. and Rocky III.
With the benefit of hindsight, though, it’s easy to see that Blade Runner might be the most influential sci-fi film ever made. Its mix of classic film noir and explorations of futuristic technology preceded The Terminator by two years, and its vision of Los Angeles as a grimy, smoke-filled, neon-coloured metropolis has been emulated so often in the last 40 years that it beggars belief. Incredibly, its thematic concerns are also somehow even more relevant today than they were in ’82, and the number of huge directors who cite it as a major influence on their careers is staggering.
2. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983)
In 2019, Todd Phillips released a movie so heavily inspired by Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy that some cinephiles immediately turned against it. The fact that the movie wound up banking more than a billion dollars at the box office was a painful reminder that sometimes cinephiles don’t really know what general audiences want or care about, though. This meant that no amount of “But Joker just ripped off The King of Comedy!” rants could make most people want to watch the scabrous, tragic Robert De Niro-starring 1983 classic – and that’s disappointing.
Frustratingly, despite being one of Scorsese’s finest films, The King of Comedy virtually disappeared upon its 1983 release. It grossed just $2.5m against a $19m budget, a fraction of what his previous collaboration with De Niro, Raging Bull, earned— and even that boxing classic was only a modest success at the time. However, in later years, The King of Comedy has been rightfully recognised as a prophetic exploration of the dangerous nature of fandom and parasocial relationships with celebrities.
1. The Way of the Gun (2000)
The reception to this 2000 crime thriller was so scathing that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie claimed it landed him in “director jail” for 12 years. In fact, he was so convinced that Hollywood wouldn’t buy what he was selling that, when producer Don Granger approached him to direct Jack Reacher, he told him, “Yeah, I’d love to do it, but I’m not [the guy] that’s gonna help it get made.” Obviously, this story had a happy ending, as McQuarrie did direct Reacher and then re-teamed with Tom Cruise on several incredible Mission: Impossible movies. Still, The Way of the Gun nearly killed his directorial career before it began, and we can’t understand why for our lives.
The film, which plays more like a modern western than a traditional crime flick, is about two low-level goons (Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe) who kidnap a woman (Juliette Lewis) pregnant with the child of a money launderer for the mob. He sends his experienced bagman Joe Sarno (James Caan) after the now-terrified criminals, who must think fast to stay alive. It’s a thrilling, funny, down-and-dirty film that would have been a huge hit if Quentin Tarantino or Steven Soderbergh’s names had been attached to it; of that much, we are certain.
