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50 Great Movies That Bombed at the Box Office: ‘Blow Out,’ ‘Mulholland Drive,’ ‘The Fabelmans,’ and More

No filmmaker has ascended to the apex of Hollywood — and stayed there — without surviving the occasional flop. Everyone from Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino to Martin Scorsese and Denis Villeneuve has released a film that, for whatever reason, didn’t resonate with audiences during its initial release. Filmmaking is a fickle industry, and if you make enough movies, one of them is bound to go wrong.

Many, many movies flop because they’re outright bad. In fact, if a blockbuster or big franchise movie goes wrong at the box office, it’s safe to assume that bad reviews and poor word-of-mouth is what scared audiences away. 2023 has given us plenty of examples of big-budget flops that flopped because of poor quality, like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”. Considering the slew of terrible superhero and action movies able to eke out a profit on name recognition alone, those are usually the most catastrophic and memorable failures.

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That said, there’s a multitude of other reasons why a film can lose money at the box office. Plenty of great movies have been the victims of bad timing, ineffective marketing campaigns, or simply being too “out there” for the general public. This year has also given us examples of gems that went sadly overlooked during their theatrical runs, such as the charming family comedy “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” Fortunately, a disappointing theatrical performance doesn’t have to be a death sentence, and many flops go on to be reevaluated as classics, cult or otherwise, in their own right. Keep reading to see some of our favorite movies that bombed at the box office.

Ryan Lattanzio, Zack Sharf, and Christian Zilko contributed to this story.

[Editor’s note: This post was published in July 2019 and has been updated multiple times since.]

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