Funnily enough it did fine at the box office but because it was positioned at the end of Disney's "golden age" and made noticeably less than any other Disney movie of the era, they pivoted away from it to the point where many people assume it's a DreamWorks or Universal animated flick.
Emperor's New Groove and Lilo & Stitch were also two of the last few times Disney put out something original. The last two decades of Disney releases have mostly been franchises they've bought from others or remakes of older Disney films that weren't even their original stories to begin with, e.g. Star Wars, MCU, 20th Century Fox, Pixar, a majority of Disney classics.
I'm not sure if Death To Smoochy counts as a cult classic, but it damn well ought to. Screw critics, screw naysayers: That movie is bold, and it is fucking hilarious.
Despite overwhelmingly positive critical reviews, Children of Men lost money in its 2006 theatrical run. Most people I knew had never heard of it, and the only person I knew who had seen it was the friend I went to the theater with. It’s now generally regarded as one of the best films of the 21st Century (so far) and particularly lauded for its cinematography. It’s had a very successful home video run since then and is even more relevant today than on its release.
Does waterworld count as a cult classic these days? I think so but I could be wrong. I thought I was going insane when it came out because I absolutely loved it and seemingly everyone else couldn’t stand it for one minute!
I really enjoyed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It got panned by the critics and didn't do well at the box office, but seems to be being more accepted recently.
It's a fun ride, but I don't know if I can say it's exactly a good movie. It's trying to scratch that same adventure itch as The Mummy or Indiana Jones, but I don't think it does it quite as well.
I had trouble with the show. I really wanted to like it, but there are too many things I didn’t like about it. But the movie was amazing. I just watched it for the first time in the past year.
How far along did you get in the show? It starts out sort of slow and cheesy, but ramps up to having really big overarching storylines and super epic battles!
Super Mario Bros. - I'm sorry for Hopper & Hoskins' experiences (RIP). But between the directorial chaos, editorial saves, and constant drunkenness, they turned out a pretty solid dark cyberpunk movie that feels more like "two New York plumbers save the day" than the recent movie. The visuals mostly still hold up, the story is okay. There's maybe a few things that could be improved, but overall I don't think it's all that bad.
If we go all the way back to 1980, the classic example is Heaven’s Gate by Deerhunter director Michael Cimino. I was alive but way too young to have bought a ticket. It was a disaster. Cost over $40m and made only $3-4m. Bankrupt United Artists, killed the western genre, was a critical and commercial failure. Pretty much destroyed Cimino’s standing as a director. However, it has since been critical re-evaluated, in part due to a couple of new edits. IMHO it’s alright. A bit long, and no Deerhunter. But it didn’t deserve the reputation.
Fun fact, Heavens Gate contained so much animal cruelty, it's one of if not the primary cause of the "no animals were harmed in the making of this movie" label we see in movies now a days. Among the list of terrible acts, they killed at least 4 horses, one of which was blown up with dynamite, and they gave many others PTSD. The wiki entry is eye opening.
Yeah that stuff is pretty grim. By all accounts Cimino was unleashed and unhinged on this movie. Some of the egregious scenes of animal cruelty were removed from later edits, for what it’s worth.
That’s the first one that came to mind for me too! Kid me absolutely loved it in theaters, and it only gets better with age. It’s so stylistically out there, there’s really nothing that looks quite like it.
Another one of my favorites was Tron: Legacy. Again, blew my mind in theaters, and I’ve come to love it even more now. I don’t think this one was a flop exactly, though it did underperform. It’s similar to Speed Racer in that it’s very visually-focused with a super unique aesthetic, though the emphasis on practical effects and physical camera stuff (lens flares etc) gives it a completely different feel that I love too.
I watched Tron Legacy in the theatre, I thought it was really good, the soundtrack was amazing but as soon as I left the theatre I never felt like seeing it again, maybe it was just fine tipped over the edge by a great soundtrack?
Yeah the soundtrack is fantastic! You’re probably aware but it’s by Daft Punk. The movie is basically a two hour Daft Punk music video honestly, and that’s probably the best mindset to watch it with.
The story and characters are definitely the weak point; they get the job done but not much more. After a couple rewatches I’ve started to appreciate the themes a bit more but really only as far as they contribute to the aesthetic.
I saw Tron in the theater in 1982! How about that? I'd forgotten all about it, until just now that I read the word "Tron".
There was an arcade next door, of course - they had the Tron game! A guy was playing like a wizard, I asked if he'd gone next door to see it, he looked at me and said - "I've seen it four times". I wonder where that guy is now. Did he go into computer engineering or something like that, just at the right time when the industry was about to explode in size?
I watched the cartoon a lot when I was a kid. I thought the movie did a remarkably good job capturing the bizarre tone of the show. It was a “weirdly campy, but serious at the same time” kind of tone. The film captured the strangeness too well, and I think that’s part of the reason critics didn’t like it. They just didn’t get it, and to be honest, I can’t totally blame them for that.
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.
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.
Weird Al's UHF is hilarious and would have done well except that it came out the same weekend as a whooole bunch of other classic movies. The weekend of July 21, 1989 the other movies you could see were:
John Carpenter's The Thing was critically and commercially panned on release. It lost the special effects Oscar to ET. It got such a bad response John Carpenter considered retiring.
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