Tom Cruise has tunnelled himself into a world of trouble with his art-house mega-flop Digger. Not only has director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s self-consciously quirky film divided, confused and, in some cases, outraged critics and audiences, the film has also achieved the seemingly impossible feat of turning film-goers off Cruise.
As he surveys the ruins of his late-career push to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor – as opposed to the guy who straps himself to planes for Mission: Impossible sequels – it may console Cruise to know that box office is but one measure of a film’s worth. The annals of Hollywood are full of movies that were a miss in the moment but were later acknowledged as misunderstood classics. In other words, not every box office bomb is a certified dud – and many deserve to be reappraised. Here is my list of top flops worth a second look.
Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Less a film than a celluloid meteor that eviscerated the decades-old United Artists studio and brought to an end the era of the Hollywood auteur, Michael Cimino’s revisionist western has gone down as the textbook cinema disaster. And fair enough, the numbers don’t lie: the project’s budget ballooned from $11m (£8.3m) to $44m (£33.1m), only for its box office to stall at a ruinous $3.5m (£2.6m).
But Heaven’s Gate is far more compelling than its reputation as Hollywood’s ultimate black hole would suggest. The cast of Kris Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert is magnificently gritty, and The Deer Hunter director Cimino is at the height of his powers as he chronicles a real-life conflict between wealthy cattle farmers and recently arrived migrants in 1890s Wyoming.
The Thing (1982)
Opening two weeks after Spielberg’s feelgood weepy E.T., John Carpenter’s The Thing was the wrong sci-fi masterpiece at the worst possible time. As dawn broke over Ronald Reagan’s America, Hollywood was suddenly all about feel-good blockbusters – and there was nothing upbeat about a Lovecraftian horror set in a remote Antarctic installation and featuring squirm-inducing gore that led one reviewer to dub it a “barf bag movie”. Despite a commanding turn by Kurt Russell, it sank into the icy depths – only to be later recognised as a masterpiece of cosmic horror and a late, glorious flourish for practical effects before they were wiped out by CGI.
Dune (1984)
Cinema’s godfather of weird David Lynch was disowning his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s space opera classic almost before the cameras stopped rolling – and never changed his mind about what he regarded as the great blot on his CV. And yet, for all his aversion to Dune, Lynch’s eerie and surrealistic touch has, over time, been revealed to be the secret sauce required to bring the novel to uncanny life.
While nowhere near as slick as the Denis Villeneuve Dune movies, Lynch’s take strikes a note of beautiful strangeness, while Kyle MacLachlan’s portrayal of pampered prince-turned-future messiah Paul Atreides leaves Timothée Chalamet’s far weedier version of the character choking on space dust.
Revolution (1985)
When Al Pacino’s American Revolution epic tanked, the consequences were immediate and terrible. Producer Goldcrest had to slash costs, with its ITV medieval caper Robin of Sherwood among the casualties. Pacino, meanwhile, walked away from screen acting and spent the next four years on Broadway. None of which is any reflection on Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson’s ground-level, almost documentary-like chronicling of America’s fight for independence. It is peak Pacino: playing an everyman trapper dragged into the conflict, he gives one of his most mercurial performances. Even his wild stab at a Cockney accent is worth it for the comic relief.
Legend (1985)
Digger isn’t the first time Cruise has found himself caught up in a box office calamity involving a visionary director and mounds of latex make-up. In the case of Ridley Scott’s misunderstood 1985 fantasy Legend, however, the latex wasn’t disguising Cruise but transforming Tim Curry into a cackling demon with bright red skin and pointed horns.
Cruise, by contrast, got away with growing his hair into a poodle-metal shag to play wide-eyed hero Jack. The movie disappeared without a trace, having already had to overcome a fire that destroyed the main set at Pinewood Studios. But Scott’s evocation of a fantasy otherworld, with shimmering trees and frolicking unicorns, is beautiful, and Cruise and Mia Sara are well matched as a hero and princess fighting the forces of evil embodied by Curry’s cartoonishly villainous Lord of Darkness.
Last Action Hero (1993)
The usually indefatigable Schwarzenegger was so appalled by the failure of his $85m (£64m) satirical action movie that he did the most un-Arnold thing imaginable and spent the weekend brooding in his house. Back in 1993, Last Action Hero’s pitiful box office was seen as proof that the muscle-bound action icon had feet of clay – but its jokey, meta tone has since been revealed to be ahead of its time. In hindsight, its real mistake was to open just a week after Jurassic Park – which made it inevitable that Spielberg’s CGI dinosaurs would stomp all over it.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
The Coen brothers’ homage to the screwball romcoms of the 1940s was such a disaster that it stalled their momentum before they had fully established themselves as Hollywood’s leading purveyors of cinematic quirkiness.
But that’s no reflection on the film itself and its charmingly madcap story of a small-town naif (Tim Robbins) who is unwittingly ensnared in the plan by a scheming mogul (Paul Newman) to drag down the share price of the mighty Hudsucker Industries. The magic realism isn’t to everyone’s taste, and this is a very different Coen film from the haunting Fargo or No Country for Old Men. But its charms are bottomless, and Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh sparkle as the 1990s’ answer to Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
The debut feature from director Kerry Conran was among the first major studio films to rely almost entirely on computer-generated backgrounds – paving the way for an entire generation of superhero and sci-fi romps. But despite its use of groundbreaking technology, Sky Captain was an old-school affair that harked back to the lurid escapism of pre-war Hollywood.
That was the problem, as nobody could quite wrap their heads around its earnest desire to be a blockbuster pulp movie – it was as if there was a joke that people weren’t quite getting. Even the starry cast of Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie seemed confused as to what they’d signed up to. But Conran was entirely serious in his love of sci-fi hokum, and, as a B-picture crammed with A-listers, Sky Captain is undeniably unique.
John Carter (2012)
A loss of $200m (£150m) is a big miss even for a mega-corporation such as Walt Disney, which parted ways with the head of its movie studio, Rich Ross, shortly after Andrew Stanton’s take on the classic John Carter of Mars novels left a smoking crater on its balance sheet. John Carter also badly damaged any prospect its lead, Taylor Kitsch, had of ascending to stardom. However, with hindsight, the film could so easily have soared rather than plunged into infamy. Here was an epic story of high adventure set in a fantastical reimagining of Mars and an all-too-rare modern example of Hollywood taking a swing at something different.
Cloud Atlas (2012)
You can only applaud Lana and Lilly Wachowski for having the courage/sheer recklessness to tackle David Mitchell’s time-hopping dystopian novel, with help from Tom Hanks, who plays six different characters across different eras. But experimental sci-fi was always going to be a tough sell, even with America’s most beloved leading man helping to lead the pitch and Cloud Atlas vanished in a box office haze. That was a tough fate for a flawed yet ambitious film that captures the thrilling weirdness of the source text as it hopscotches breathlessly across the decades.
Dredd (2012)
Perhaps the biggest mistake writer Alex Garland makes with Dredd is to capture too accurately the bleak wit and apocalyptic doom of 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd character. Karl Urban fully inhabits the helmet-wearing anti-hero as he wades through hordes of “perps” in his mission to bring order to an anarchic tower block. This is the gleeful, chaotic 2000 AD lifted from the page and brought directly to the screen – but droll dystopian carnage is an acquired taste, and Dredd arguably does far too good a job of capturing the spirit of the source material and alienating more mainstream audiences.
The Last Duel (2021)
Uniting the power trio of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and director Ridley Scott, hopes for this costumed thriller were high – particularly when you factored in Jodie Comer, in her biggest post-Killing Eve role to date. But audiences coming out of Covid were not in the mood for a gritty costume drama set in medieval France, told from multiple viewpoints and centred on a brutal sexual assault. It all sounded like hard work – though anyone who had gone to the trouble would have discovered a late-period gem from Scott. The director felt the film hard done by, blaming its failure on “millennials” and their “f**king cell phones”.
Babylon (2022)
“I still can’t figure out why people hated it,” said Margot Robbie after Damien Chazelle’s homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood took in just $15m (£11.3m) in the US. I understand her bafflement. Babylon is a heady and mischievous love letter to the movie-making business that blends dark humour (it opens with an explosion of elephant dung) and charismatic turns by Robbie and Brad Pitt as Old Hollywood royalty. As striking as the Hollywood sign blazing in the sun, it deserves better than to be written off as the indulgence of a former boy wonder film-maker who has been in director’s jail ever since.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
After Mad Max: Fury Road suffered through a notoriously troubled shoot in the Namibian desert, there was an expectation that George Miller’s future-shock road movie would crash and burn at the box office. Instead, it turned out to be one of the greatest action flicks of the 21st century. Alas, the disaster-on-four-wheels prophecy came belatedly true with the no-less thrilling follow-up, in which Anya Taylor-Joy blazes bright as the younger version of the Charlize Theron character, only for the film to go dark at the box office.