Winona Ryder had no idea her favourite movie was a complete failure: “It never made a profit”
The greatest actors are those who don’t care about profit, who take on projects because they want to be a part of something exciting, something that they genuinely, truly, care about.
Hollywood is an industry obsessed with money – it has become business more so than art – and it’s easy to get caught up in box-office profits, and this more artificial side of success, where triumph is measured in sales and awards show buzz. But Winona Ryder has never been one to fall victim to such shallow indicators of success, and it actually took her a while to realise that her favourite project was actually a financial flop.
The actor has been in many acclaimed hits over the years, from her early days in the likes of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, to more recent successes, like Black Swan and Stranger Things, but Heathers will always be her favourite. She once revealed to Entertainment Weekly, “I looove this movie—to the point where I talk about it like I’m not even in it. If it’s on TV, I watch it. I’ve probably seen it 50 times. Like, I can do it by heart.”
Directed by Daniel Waters, the film defined the ‘80s with its dark, satirical approach to high school hierarchy and the teenage experience. Endlessly quotable (“Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw”) and exhilarating in its outrageousness, which is somehow both as absurd and obscene as it is strangely realistic, Heathers paved the way for teen comedies to get a little grittier.
It was so much different from something like Pretty in Pink or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
While these aforementioned films from the John Hughes teen comedy universe grossed tens of millions of dollars, becoming major hits adored by teens and adults alike, Heathers only made $1.1 million, which wasn’t great, especially considering its $3 million budget. Looking at the metrics, Heathers was a failure then, but can you really call a movie that has since spawned a musical and is widely loved and quoted a flop? Of course not.
It just took audiences a little more time to see the brilliance of Heathers, which was arguably way ahead of its time. With a plotline that included the murder of two jocks – their deaths staged to look like they were lovers who, because of homophobic taboo, can’t be together – many critics were uncomfortable with high school being depicted in such a way.
Somehow, these satirical explorations of murder were way more controversial than the date rape implications and overt racism found in Sixteen Candles, which came out a few years earlier. It’s a shame that Heathers wasn’t appreciated as well as it should’ve been upon its release, but Ryder didn’t look at the box-office statistics.
For ages, she was actually totally oblivious to just how much the movie had underperformed financially. In the same Entertainment Weekly interview, Ryder said, “I didn’t even really know that it didn’t do well, to be honest. I was just so damn excited that it was so good. It just reminds me of a wonderful time in an actor’s life when all that mattered is that you were really good in a movie.”
Meanwhile, Waters admitted that he “made more money writing a treatment for Parent Trap 3 for the Disney Channel that never happened,” with producer Denise Di Novi adding, “It was a nightmare. I paid for the ad in the L.A. Times myself for the second week. It was $1,800, which to me was like $18,000.”
These days, though, Heathers stands out as one of Ryder’s most iconic performances, and its influence over the teen genre, from Mean Girls (directed by Waters’ brother, Mark) to Jawbreaker, cannot be mistaken.
