The movie Guillermo del Toro knew was doomed: “I understand why it happened”
Even though he’s a three-time Academy Award winner and one of modern cinema’s most distinctive auteurs, Guillermo del Toro isn’t exactly what anyone would call a reliably bankable director.
The highest-grossing film of his career remains Pacific Rim, which looked on course to flop after underperforming in the United States until it turned out to be a hit in China, which contributed over 25% of its total haul and encouraged the studio to greenlight the sequel he ended up dropping out of.
The first Hellboy movie was a modest success that only got a second instalment because it sold so well on home video. The follow-up, The Golden Army, didn’t make enough money at the multiplex to justify the closing chapter in the trilogy that del Toro and his leading man, Ron Perlman, were so desperate to make.
Nightmare Alley tanked, but there was at least a pandemic-shaped asterisk next to its name. In fact, of the 15 top-earning features he’s been involved in as either a writer, director, producer, or executive producer, he was only wielding the megaphone on four of them, and The Shape of Water has been his most profitable effort by quite a distance.
Of course, box office isn’t the barometer of a good director, and del Toro is one of his generation’s most easily identifiable. His name is synonymous with the fantastical, stunning production design, gothic trappings and tragedy, all of which were neatly combined into a single package when he made Crimson Peak.
The atmospheric chamber piece carried a decent-sized budget, and the marketing promised that it would make spines tingle. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the film he devised, developed, scripted, shot, or edited, but the studio thought it would be a much better idea to position it as a more conventional horror movie and unleash it two weeks before Halloween when demand for the genre is at its highest.
“The thing that will always, pun intended, haunt that movie is that it was sold as a horror movie,” he told Vulture. “But I remember distinctly, when we had the meetings, they were all targeted towards getting the horror audience for the opening weekend. And I knew we were doomed.”
Del Toro was pushing for Universal to build the marketing campaign around the romantic and mysterious aspects of the narrative, but the top brass weren’t interested. Instead, anyone who didn’t know a thing about Crimson Peak would have sat down expecting a period-set horror about ghosts and ghouls, which it kind of was but also wasn’t.
“The last thing you want to do is promote it as a horror,” he sighed. “We were opening in October, and October is the month of Halloween, so I understand why it happened.” A commercial disappointment followed, something del Toro had seen coming from a mile away.
