What films that flopped when they came out but you saw in the theater and loved, that are now universally acclaimed or cult classics?
Films that may have flopped but not because of you, because you did your part and bought a ticket.
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Dredd and John Carter. In both cases the film was tanked by marketing (or lack thereof).
I absolutely loved Dredd when I finally got around to seeing it at home. The visuals made me wish I had seen it in theaters. It was so viciously and grotesquely beautiful.
If they had just called it "John Carter of Mars" it would have at least communicated a major plot point. It was a really ambitious attempt to reboot a classic science fiction novel, but since nobody remembered what Barsoom was they were at a disadvantage.
Dredd was a great movie. It's an apology to the fans after the Stallone movie.
I still maintain that while not the same disaster as a film that it was as an investment, John Carter was muddy, its source material was past its sell-by date, and it topped out at "okay." I'm not at all sure added marketing budget would have made enough additional fans to have made it worthwhile.
The John Carter source material was so old that I imagine the movie was championed by dinosaur executives who remembered loving it when they were kids. Their underlings were afraid to say no.
That probably isn’t how things went down, but it’s my head canon.
IIRC it was a passion property for Andrew Stanton, who was coming off of one of the most insanely good Pixar resumes in an era of amazing Pixar resumes.
Unfortunately, when something is old and influential, a modern audience is going to have seen things influenced by it for decades, and the original can sometimes become a kind of "inside baseball" that only appeals to the passion of people who are into the historical context of their fields.
Nobody is making millions off of Citizen Kane or Metropolis.