“After the fact, it’s bogus”: the two movies the Coen brothers called “disasters”
Throughout their careers, the Coen brothers have always managed to maintain their status as brand-name directors in Hollywood, despite rarely making mainstream fare.
From the moment they burst onto the scene with 1984’s sweaty neo-noir Blood Simple, the oddball Minnesotan brothers were (rightly) tagged as visionary geniuses by Hollywood’s decision makers. After all, they convinced 20th Century Fox to let them make what amounted to a live-action Tex Avery cartoon with their follow-up, followed by a 1920s gangster picture and a bizarre genre-bending thriller about a troubled playwright writing movie scripts in 1940s Hollywood.
Indeed, it would take until 1996, a full 12 years after their debut, for the Coens to helm a movie that was a bona fide hit at the box office. Raising Arizona was a minor success in ’87, but their next three films were all disasters that lost millions of dollars. Despite this, it felt like Hollywood knew these guys were so goddamn talented and original that they’d eventually work out how to marry their quirky sensibilities to the tastes of mainstream audiences, and the industry was eventually proved correct by the likes of Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and No Country for Old Men.
Sadly, in the modern Hollywood landscape, it’s hard to imagine a pair of auteurs being given the room to experiment and fucking fail quite like the Coens were in the ‘80s and ‘90s. These days, it often seems like one flop and your career is on life support, which speaks to the inherent shitstorm underpinning the industry. If the Coens were coming up in 2025, for instance, they’d probably have an unhealthy obsession with box office figures, which could cloud their decision-making processes and lead to them softening their weirder edges to appeal more to the masses.
Thankfully, though, that wasn’t the experience the brothers had, and their attitude toward commercial success has always been very healthy. Indeed, even when they acknowledged that two of their early films were “disasters”, they didn’t tie themselves up in knots about it. “We want the movies to be seen,” Joel told Playboy magazine in 2001, showing that they were never naive to the realities of the business. “At the same time, we’re resigned to the fact that we’re not making commercial movies and the appeal will be limited.”
Ethan admitted that the brothers were always gratified when one of their films performed better than they expected, and bitterly disappointed when they didn’t live up to expectations. “The Hudsucker Proxy was the worst commercially,” he confessed, referring to their 1994 screwball comedy that made only $11million on a budget of $25m. “Miller’s Crossing didn’t do any business, either. From a financial point of view, they were disasters.”
When faced with failures like these, though, the Coens resolved never to fall into doing what many other filmmakers may have done: over-analysis. They refused to pick over their failures by trying to work out why they didn’t connect, just like they never wanted to lose themselves in scrutinising why another film was beloved by audiences. To the Coens, these vagaries are inherently unknowable, and they’d just end up second-guessing themselves if they fell down the rabbit hole of trying to reverse-engineer success. “After the fact, it’s bogus,” Joel deadpanned. “Who knows?”
