Heaven's Gate, once supposed to be among the worst films and biggest box office flops of all time, was re-released in its original cut a couple of years ago, and lo and behold turns out to be a truly great epic Western. The story of its original release is a strange tale of petty feuding by the studio with its director that resulted in the studio pretty much blowing its own foot off, foisting an inferior cut of the film along with a juicy "disastrous production" story on the public. Years later, the film is back as a genuine hit.
This put me in mind of "box office flops" that in fact are good or great films, some of which have gone on to become hugely influential classics. Of this category of films, what are your favorites?
My top twenty:
1. The Iron Giant: Failed at the box office but made Brad Bird a legend anyway.
2. The Big Lebowski*
3. Bringing Out the Dead
4. Ride With the Devil (simply one of the best Civil War epics ever made, and one that doesn't romanticize -- nor demonize -- the South)
5. Cloud Atlas (brilliant realization of what I'd thought was an unfilmable book)
6. Citizen Kane*
7. Harold and Maude*
8. Children of Men
9. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
10. Office Space*
11. K-19: The Widowmaker (probably not helped by its forbidding History Textbook name, but it's a badass submarine drama)
12. Blade Runner*
13. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (it was just too soon to make it, but my God was it beautiful)
14. Donnie Darko*
15. Lolita
16. Grindhouse
17. Idiocracy (as a satire of the stupidity often exhibited by present-day pop culture it's almost too spot on)
18. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story ("Get outta here, Dewey! You don't want no part of this sh*t!")
19. The 13th Warrior (actually a pretty credible adaptation of Crichton's Eaters of the Dead)
20. Conan the Barbarian
* Yes, these were all box office bombs. So too were The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life.
This put me in mind of "box office flops" that in fact are good or great films, some of which have gone on to become hugely influential classics. Of this category of films, what are your favorites?
My top twenty:
1. The Iron Giant: Failed at the box office but made Brad Bird a legend anyway.
2. The Big Lebowski*
3. Bringing Out the Dead
4. Ride With the Devil (simply one of the best Civil War epics ever made, and one that doesn't romanticize -- nor demonize -- the South)
5. Cloud Atlas (brilliant realization of what I'd thought was an unfilmable book)
6. Citizen Kane*
7. Harold and Maude*
8. Children of Men
9. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
10. Office Space*
11. K-19: The Widowmaker (probably not helped by its forbidding History Textbook name, but it's a badass submarine drama)
12. Blade Runner*
13. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (it was just too soon to make it, but my God was it beautiful)
14. Donnie Darko*
15. Lolita
16. Grindhouse
17. Idiocracy (as a satire of the stupidity often exhibited by present-day pop culture it's almost too spot on)
18. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story ("Get outta here, Dewey! You don't want no part of this sh*t!")
19. The 13th Warrior (actually a pretty credible adaptation of Crichton's Eaters of the Dead)
20. Conan the Barbarian
* Yes, these were all box office bombs. So too were The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life.
Note that a lot of these -- like Blade Runner, Big Lebowski or Iron Giant -- seem to be examples of the "long game" in cinema: that dedication to simply making a good movie can be rewarded by long-term profits and credibility long after more forgettable, but short-term profitable, films sink beneath the waves. (Cf. the number of people today who can remember Presumed Innocent, Bird on a Wire, Cobra, Stir Crazy, Brubaker, Disclosure, What Lies Beneath or Hope Floats -- all hits in their time.) Would you say this is true of any of your picks as well?
