Hats off to Tim Robey, long a perceptive film critic on the Daily Telegraph, for, first, coming up with an enviably smart concept. A study of the box-office flops that have, over the past century or so, defined the industry. Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t you?
Still, as Box Office Poison exhaustively demonstrates, plenty of sound talents have turned silk purses back into pigs’ ears. A pirate flick with Geena Davis sounds like a good idea. Yet Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island for a while ruled as the most ruinous flop ever made. Oliver Stone has the right grandiose aesthetic for a life of Alexander the Great. Colin Farrell seemed like smart casting for the title role in 2004. As Robey relates, however, Stone’s Alexander was such a catastrophe it ended the craze for sword-and-sandal epics that Gladiator had kicked off four years earlier.
One wrong way to go about such a book would be to ape the gleeful schadenfreude of Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss’s sophomoric 1978 diversion The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Robey certainly has fun with his catastrophes. This is, after all, a man who admits to voluntarily sitting through Tom Hooper’s Cats, a film he awarded an almost unprecedented zero stars, on four excruciating occasions. But the book has a more serious purpose.
Over 26 chapters, each devoted to a single film, Robey sketches an economical history of the American film industry from the silent era to the pandemic. We begin with DW Griffith’s Intolerance from 1916 and end with Cats from (ominously) late 2019. The author convincingly argues that it is not just the incomparable wretchedness of the Andrew Lloyd Webber adaptation that qualifies it for the role of warbling fat lady. The rise of streaming as an option for failing productions — or silent interment as with Warner Bros’ recent, unreleased Batgirl — makes such public catastrophes less likely. Nobody can complain about disappointing ticket sales if no tickets are on sale.
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There are some eccentricities in the selection. Publishing such a volume with no entry for Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, a flop that terrified the industry for decades, is akin to delivering a book on shark movies with no dedicated section on Jaws, but Robey is surely right to suggest that such “warhorses” have “been flogged to death”. We still have Steven Bach’s classic Final Cut on the Cimino movie.
The chosen entries skirt everything from near-masterpieces such as Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and Tod Browning’s Freaks to weeping pustules such as Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing But Trouble and Jan de Bont’s Speed 2: Cruise Control. It feels as if Robey has stretched the net to its widest by including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York – a project never likely to make billions – but his elegant tribute to a favourite film excuses that harmless indulgence. If the book has a problem it stems from the truth that, like Tolstoy’s happy families, all runaway projects are alike. There are, here, enough creative accounting, overambitious sets, ruinous weather, shady financiers and unfettered egos to generate another millennium of box-office debacles.
Robey’s balanced prose and tart gags — Box Office Poison has the sparkiest footnotes of the season — does, however, ensure the journey is lively throughout. Is the story really over? In the closing chapter he comes close to admitting he would have enjoyed a crack at Sony’s Madame Web (2024) or Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022). He must be fuming that Joker: Folie à Deux, the current decade’s noisiest splat, arrived too late for even that brief acknowledgment.
A perfect Christman gift for the movie inclined.
Donald Clarke is a film critic for The Irish Times
