Rolling Thunder Pictures: Quentin Tarantino’s short-lived failed experiment
There aren’t many people in the industry who adore cinema in quite the same way that Quentin Tarantino does, although he’s got a habit of overestimating just how much the average filmgoer shares his enthusiasm for the medium’s deeper cuts.
The Grindhouse experiment was an abject failure, with lifelong shlock lovers Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez putting their heads together for a double-feature designed to immerse audiences in the exact type of exploitation flick they’d grown up revering.
Of course, the end result was a dismal box office performance in the United States, a studio separating Planet Terror and Death Proof to release them individually overseas in an attempt to offset some of the losses, and a rare admission of defeat from the two-time Academy Award winner that he failed to read the room.
That wasn’t even his first attempt to bring unsung and unheralded films to the masses, either, but his initial foray flew under the radar to a much greater extent. Named after one of his favourite-ever films, Tarantino co-founded and launched Rolling Thunder Pictures alongside Jerry Martinez as an independent distribution arm of Miramax, with the hope of instilling his fandom with an education of sorts.
Opening its doors in 1995, the aim was to re-release Tarantino’s personally curated gems for theatrical distribution, and there was a solid range of titles on display. Rolling Thunder Pictures oversaw fresh rollouts for Italian supernatural horror The Beyond, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, blaxploitation actioner Detroit 9000, creature feature The Mighty Peking Man, yakuza thriller Sonatine, gang story Switchblade Sisters, mockumentary Hard Core Logo, and black comedy crime caper Curdled.
The downside is that folks weren’t all that interested, something Tarantino would be the first to admit. “Yeah, I ended up pulling the plug on it because it ended up being mostly a frustration, not fulfilment,” he explained to Sebastian Haselbeck. “Yeah, I think that idea actually ended up being way before its time.”
Rolling Thunder Pictures quietly shuttered in 1999, with the filmmaker discovering that his unabashed love for lower-tier cinematic excellence wasn’t being reciprocated to a profitable extent. He’s one of the best around as a writer and director, but as a distributor, it was proven beyond all doubt that Tarantino’s short-lived experiment was an abject failure.
He did toy with the idea of a relaunch prior to the release of Grindhouse, though, saying that “some of these cool exploitation movies” that inspired the dual-pronged flop could be released on home video under the Rolling Thunder banner to coincide with what he presumably thought would be a surge in interest for the subgenre.
Needless to say, when Grindhouse failed to make waves or even turn a penny of profit, the potential revival was quietly swept under the rug, never to be heard from again.
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