8 British journalist Tim Robey explores the cultural phenomenon of the blockbuster flop and what it says about Hollywood. The Art of Failure: A History of Film Flops Tells a Different Hollywood Story By Luis Polanco “Merely log the highest-grossing films of a given decade, the Best Picture winners, and so forth, and you’re telling only a flattering fraction of the Hollywood story,” writes Tim Robey in his most recent book, Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops (336 pgs., Hanover Square Press, 2024, $32.99). Robey, a British journalist who writes on film for the Daily Telegraph, is fascinated with the cultural phenomenon of the “flop,” films with exorbitant budgets, disastrous production stories, uncontainable egos, and behindthe-scenes conflicts between the very people making the project, which, for some reason or other, fail totally at the time of their premieres. In Box Office Poison, Robey looks at the different species of flops, sharing stories from films ranging from the early twentieth century to the present. From chapter to chapter, each dedicated to a brilliant specimen of flop, the reader is charmed by Robey’s blazing voice, which is, at turns, breezy, snarky, and highly engaging. Robey begins with one of the earliest examples of a flop, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. After the critical backlash to The Birth of a Nation by organizations such as the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for the film’s overt racism and glorification of hate groups, director Griffith retaliated by reversing the script. Actually, his detractors were the intolerant ones, and not his film. Such was the origin story behind one of Hollywood’s first gigantic flops, Intolerance, a 1916 three-and-a-halfhour silent epic consisting of four stories that spanned centuries, covering Christ’s death, the St. Bartholomew Day's massacre of 1572, and the fall of the Babylonian empire in 539 BC. Even the brief glimpse at the film’s scope will hint at the headache the set design and budget caused. Robey writes, “It was one of the most ostentatiously vast film sets ever built—walls 300 feet (91 meters) high, enclosing a city within a city, with 3,000 costumed extras wandering about inside.” Robey suggests the film budget likely reached upwards of $2.5 million, although online rumors propose an exaggerated $8.4 million, and Griffith biographers such as Richard Schickel conclude $1.9 million was much more likely. Nevertheless, the film only grossed approximately one million, and when compared with Birth of a Nation’s $20 million worldwide gross, Intolerance set a low bar. Robey also highlights films that were flops for the danger they posed to the director and talent in potentially ruining their careers. One such case is David Lynch’s Dune, the space opera released in 1984 by Universal and adapted from Frank Herbert’s science-fiction novel of the same name. Dune — which was recently adapted into a two-part film by Denis Villeneuve — had a history of unsuccessful attempts at being made into a movie. At one point, Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs tried to adapt it, followed by a big financial push to get the Chilean-French avantgarde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct a version. Then producer Dino de Laurentiis bought the rights to the book in 1978, and at first Ridley Scott was set to direct it, but then De Laurentiis got David Lynch, who was hot off of his critical acclaim with Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. Robey hints that one of the reasons for Lynch’s flop of a Dune adaptation could come from different visions between him and de Laurentiis. He writes, “If that phrase creative differences ever sank a film, it did this one — not as a euphemism for particularly bad personal spats, but in the truer sense of a stark, unresolved friction between what a director and his producers had in mind.” There was also the issue of the film’s scale and budget concerns. “With its 53 speaking parts, 70 sets, and 900 crew members, Dune was a gigantic enterprise that De Laurentiis, chronically averse to paying taxes, was determined to make on the cheap.” When the film was released, Dune’s budget reached $47 million and had a U.S. gross of $30.9 million. There is also the species of flop reserved for those weird, unsettling films that evoke an audience response of glee and horror. In this genre, Robey highlights the recent 2019 film Cats, directed by Tom Hopper and adapted from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wildly successful 1981 musical. The film featured a star-studded cast with everyone from theater royalty like Judi Dench and Ian McKellen to late-night personalities like James Corden to musical artists like Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift. The reasons behind Cats’ inclusion in the book of flops could be attributed to challenges in the production timeline and its considerable visual effects. After viewers were bewildered by the look of the film based on its trailer, the film’s flop status took on a comedic value. “[The movie] was a viral failure, memed everywhere,” writes Robey. It was also recognized as a box office disaster, with a budget of $95 million, but approximately $210 million with marketing, to only garner a worldwide gross amount of $75.5 million. The response to flops has changed, in part due to the impact that the pandemic and the shift to streaming has had on the movie-making business, particularly when theater-goers were unable to see movies in person. Flops, though, remain entertaining. There’s something deliciously exhilarating about flops. As Robey writes, “[we] crave them, we need to know all about them, and sometimes we can’t help but treasure them, even when we also can’t believe we’re physically seeing them.” There’s something deliciously exhilarating about flops. VIDEOAGE October 2025 Book Review
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTI4OTA5