Box Office Poison
Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
***A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB MUST-READ BOOK OF NOVEMBER 2024***
"A wild success." — Publishers Weekly
"A surefire hit." —Library Journal STARRED review
"A brilliant star turn." —Andrew O’Hagan
A riotous and revealing story of Hollywood’s most spectacular flops and how they ended careers, bankrupted studios and changed film history.
"Failure fascinates, for all the reasons that success is a drag…”
From grand follies to misunderstood masterpieces, disastrous sequels to catastrophic literary adaptations, Box Office Poison tells a hugely entertaining alternative history of Hollywood, through a century of its most notable flops. What can these films tell us about the Hollywood system, the public’s appetite–or lack of it–and the circumstances that saw such flops actually made? Away from the canon, this is the definitive take on these ill-fated, but essential celluloid failures.
Robey covers a vast century of flops, including: Intolerance; Queen Kelly; Freaks; Sylvia Scarlett; The Magnificent Ambersons; Land of the Pharoahs; Doctor Dolittle; Sorcerer; Dune; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; Nothing But Trouble; The Hudsucker Proxy; Cutthroat Island; Speed 2: Cruise Control; Babe: Pig in the City; Supernova; Rollerball; The Adventures of Pluto Nash; Gigli; Alexander; Catwoman; A Sound of Thunder; Speed Racer; Synecdoche, New York; Pan; and Cats.
From Daily Telegraph film critic Tim Robey, this is a brilliantly fun exploration of human nature and stupidity in some of the greatest film flops throughout history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daily Telegraph film critic Robey (coeditor of The DVD Stack) serves up a rollicking survey of cinematic turkeys from 1916's Intolerance through 2019's Cats. Many of the films succumbed to studio interference, Robey contends, recounting how a discouraging test screening for Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons caused studio RKO to cut and reshoot significant portions of the film without Welles's input. Other movies suffered from chaotic productions. For instance, the on-location shoot in Egypt for Howard Hawks's Land of the Pharaohs was hamstrung by equipment failure, screenwriter William Faulkner's alcoholism, and rowdy extras drawn from the Egyptian army, while Peter Hyams's sci-fi flick A Sound of Thunder churned through stars and had to make do with bargain-bin special effects after its shady financial backers went bankrupt. Some flops are masterpieces too unorthodox to hold mass appeal, Robey contends, singling out George Miller's uncommonly dark children's film Babe: Pig in the City. The selections refreshingly exclude many of the usual suspects (Waterworld, Ishtar) to make room for less-discussed bombs, and it's a joy to watch Robey gleefully rip into true stinkers, as when he writes of Catwoman, "Drag Race parodies could quote this entire script and never hope to capture the singular idiocy with which it lands." This catalog of mediocrity is a wild success.
