Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops

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. Agent: Veronica Goldstein, UTA. (Nov.)