The X-rated 1983 Gene Hackman movie that sat on the shelf for three years: “I’d rather it die than turn into a cause”
Not even Gene Hackman could make an austere historical epic a success.
It has become an increasingly common practice among film studios to completely bury films that are near completion. Warner Bros famously cancelled the releases of two nearly completed films, Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, when they determined that they were of poor quality, and could be seen as damaging the brand.
There are also films caught up in legal issues that have been prevented from coming out; licensing disputes about the release of Kung Fury 2, an absurdist action-comedy starring Michael Fassbender and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have held it from release, despite the fact that it was filmed in 2019. After Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 bombed at the box office, Warner Bros cancelled the release of the second part of Kevin Costner’s western epic, and it has yet to find a new distributor.
It was less often that films of the ‘80s would be cancelled or deleted outright, but there were certainly instances in which they were forced to sit on the shelf for years, and often given only the smallest releases possible. After Michael Cimino’s legendary western Heaven’s Gate flopped at the box office so hard that it caused the collapse of United Artists, other studios became nervous about letting auteur directors roll out their passion projects.
Nicolas Roeg was an acclaimed filmmaker who had made several well-received genre films, such as Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. He took on one of his most ambitious projects to date with Eureka, an epic drama that starred Gene Hackman as a gold prospector in the 1920s who fears that he will be taken advantage of by his family and the mob. It’s a grandiose statement about the evils of capitalism and the failings of the ‘American Dream’, and it was one that required years of research in order to prepare. The film was loosely based on the real murder of Sir Henry Oakes, and the first draft of the screenplay ran over 1,800 pages long.
Although the film began shooting in 1981, United Artists wasn’t sure what they had on their hands and began biding its time before a release date was announced. Given that the film was rated X for its extreme violence, there was little that could be done to market it to a mainstream audience; despite the success of Midnight Cowboy a decade earlier, it was highly rare for an X-rated film to have any sort of financial success.
The film was given a brief theatrical rollout in London in May 1983, but United Artists didn’t put it out in the United States until October 1984, where it was released under the subsidiary MGM/UA Classics. Despite all the discourse surrounding the film, Roeg said he wasn’t interested in making Eureka a fixation point of controversy.
“I believe in it, and I believe it will have a life, but I’d rather it die than turn into a cause,” he said plainly.
Unfortunately, Roeg more or less got his wish when Eureka bombed, making less than $125,000 on a reported budget of $11million. It wasn’t enough to destroy Roeg’s reputation as a genius, and Hackman too quickly rebounded with several other hit films in the late ‘80s. However, it is interesting that Eureka has never been restored fully on streaming or physical media, and no one has made an effort to claim it as a misunderstood classic.
