Review: 'Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops'

History is written by the winners, and you can't have winners without plenty of losers. If we're talking about cinema, those losers are the over-budget, the ill-conceived, the box office disasters, the digitally-enhanced-cat-furred. Such films are the focus of Tim Robey in his new book Box Office Poison, which homes in on 26 flops that altered, or at least passed through, cinema history. His one criteria for inclusion was a film that earned significantly less than it cost. The causes of such failure are myriad. A movie might be the victim of over-complication and undercooked rabble-rousing (Intolerance), megalomania and depravity (Queen Kelly), too much boundary pushing for contemporary audiences (Freaks and Sylvia Scarlett), studio butchery and artistic inattention (The Magnificent Ambersons), outsized competition (Sorcerer, trampled by Star Wars), good-'ol artistic differences (David Lynch and Dino De Laurentiis at loggerheads over Dune), pure putridity (Nothing But Trouble, my personal pick for the worst movie ever made), shoddy special effects and shoddier pre-release press (Cats), or meddling maniacal stars and giraffes who stomp on their own dicks (Doctor Dolittle). 

Reading Robey's short chapters on each of these films can be fascinating, very funny when the circumstances are outrageously absurd enough, and informative when illustrating why certain careers hit the skids or certain types of movies stopped being made. But bearing witness to so much failure and wallowing in so many bad movies gets a little depressing after a while. 

The author also heavily favors the films of the 1990s and 2000s. He selected just one movie to represent each decade from the 1910s through the 1970s, and just two from the 1980s, leaving such infamous losers as Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, Can't Stop the Music, and Raise the Titanic in the waste bin. Did you know that the Marx Brothers' beloved comedy classic Duck Soup was a major box office flop? Well, you won't learn it from Box Office Poison.  

Robey covers as many films that came out in the 2000s as he does ones that came out from the 1910s and the 1980s, but that's also because studios pumped more money into movies during the 2000s, and thus, had more to lose. Then Cats, covid, and the safe convenience of home-streaming essentially brought an end to the likelihood of future flops of such incredible magnitude, or so Robey argues.

Still there is a lot to enjoy in Box Office Poison, and if anything, my initial gripe about the book was that its chapters were two short, and as I said in another recent review, wishing there was more of something is the most complimentary complaint one can issue.