What is the lowest-grossing movie to reach number one?
It’s easy to forget just how many films are being made in Hollywood and beyond.
While new projects and original IP seem ever harder to greenlight in the era of risk-averse superhero blockbuster bludgeons, whether it was cinema’s silent infancy or the streaming era of today, your passion film project is likely to be a dud at best.
It’s only natural. Most films are somewhere between a lauded Oscar winner and Razzie-chucked turkey, prevaricating somewhere in the middle of ‘OK’ after mammoth energy, funding, and marketing had been poured into the movie to no avail.
Why exactly didn’t the 1995 pirate caper Cutthroat Island just not click with audiences in a way that, say, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl did less than ten years later? Whod’a thought that you couldn’t just swap Men in Black’s comic sci-fi for a high-fantasy cowboy setting and strike gold on Wild Wild West? Going back earlier, director Peter Yates must have been kicking himself when Krull failed to win box office success like Conan the Barbarian or even Excalibur.
The fact is, one minute you’re John McTiernan boasting the likes of Predator and Die Hard, then you’re landing the most commercially dismal failure of 1999 with The 13th Warrior. Audiences are a fickle thing. Along with inept promotion, quashing by bigger blockbuster behemoths, or the simple excoriation of a savage press already warding off potential ticket buyers, sometimes a filmmaker just finds they don’t have that lucrative finger on the pulse anymore.
The disastrous depths a movie bomb has plummeted to are tough to definitely measure, as much of the data surrounding budgets and revenue is frequently opaque. However, box office success is, for whatever reason, able to be gleaned down to the dollar. With that, it’s entirely possible to uncover the feature that sold sod-all tickets while strangely sitting at the top of Hollywood’s gross rankings on release.
So, what is the lowest-grossing movie to reach number one?
Released in 2020, Venezuelan writer and director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Resistance biopic of mime artist Marcel Marceau seemed to enjoy all the grade-A treatment, ensuring a hefty return. While critically mixed, Jesse Eisenberg’s starring role and wartime setting would, in another time, have likely yielded a reasonable revenue that would have at least broken the movie even and made the whole effort worthwhile.
Yet, as we all know, 2020 wasn’t a normal year. Resistance was dropped at about the worst time of the Pandemic during March, when the whole world was holding its breath and utterly unsure of how to tackle the global Covid crisis. With pubs, venues, and even supermarkets shutting shop for the foreseeable future, the last thing the public was going to do was take a trip down to the flicks, even if they were open.
On the opening weekend, Resistance made $2,490 amid a barren theatre landscape and reportedly all from one screen’s worth of showings, yet due to the cinema shutdown across the world, Jakubowicz’s war thriller was the top of the box office with out competition. Seeing the lay of the land, distributor IFC Films swiftly made the film available on streaming services sharpish.
