Rocketship X-M, 1950.
No, I don’t, I have no idea of what you’re talking about. Really. Never heard that at all in any context.
Chuck- yes, Office Space is another good one.
Kids were quoting of Mice & Men without realizing it, due to the Bugs Bunny cartoon. What was sorta ironic was that they were using the term “George” to indicate a stupid person “I’ll hug it and squeeze it and call it George”, even tho of course George was the smart one.
But both of those movies were hugely popular. At that point, the movie isn’t affecting pop culture beyond its limited audience, but has become culture because its audience is actually quite large.
In that vein, Idiocracy, which did no almost no business at the box office (I think it played in only a few theaters for a week), but is now quoted often. It’s also proving to be quite prescient. 
I’m not sure if you are being serious here, are you talking about the 2007 movie with Morgan Freeman, or some other film called the Bucket list? Because I heard of bucket lists a hell of a long time before that film came out.
“Hardly anyone” is a strange way to describe worldwide receipts of $175 million. :dubious:
The Princess Bride was originally a box office failure, but inspired countless catchphrases such as “Inconceivable!”, “Only mostly dead,” “Never start a land war in Asia,” and so on.
Genuine box office bombs such as Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar and John Carter have entered the lexicon as examples of utter, absolute failure.
But one of my own…
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie was a flop, but people loved the ridiculous title. It still had so much pull in the late 90s that Joss Whedon was able to get The WB to come to him to make it into a show.
I guess it wasn’t really a failure since it made $60million on a $30million budget, but Snakes on a Plane had everbody quoting it wether they saw the movie or not.
“The Big Lebowski” only made $46million worldwide, but has since been everywhere. The Dude Abides indeed.
Five Easy Pieces wasn’t exactly a flop, but only did modest business. However, the scene of Jack Nicholson ordering in a diner is one of the better known movie scenes; many more people have seen it than have ever seen the entire movie.
This guy couldn’t find a usage of the phrase with the relevant meaning before 2004.
This could bring up an entire different discussion because I saw the trailers for John Carter and thought “I can;t wait for that to come on demand/video because I’m gonna rent it”. The movie was a box office bomb, but that didn’t detract me from wanting to watch it.
How many movies became post-theater successes because the desire to see it in a theater was zero, but the desire to the movie itself was pretty high
The Perfect Storm did boffo business, but use of the title term went far beyond those who saw the movie.
What about* Plan 9 From Outer Space*, which came to equal “so bad, you gotta see it”?
Correct.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Gross profits have been about $1 million. Try to get through a D&D session or SCA event without making a reference. I dare you.
I think that’s gross US profits on a fairly recent theatrical re-release. The box office was about $125 million for a budget of $350,000, which make it a comfortable commercial success.
I’d nominate 1958’s “The Hidden Fortress” as a movie that’s had influence out of proportion to its receipts.
Of course this is the Akira Kurosawa black-and-white inspiration for Lucas’s Star Wars mega-cultural-phenomenon. (I can’t actually find any information on how much money the 1958 movie has made, at either IMDb or Wikipedia. But I’d guess that the total is dwarfed by the moolah made on the Star Wars empire.)
Sidelight on “The Bucket List” as a phrase: last summer, a beach-resort city commissioned a commercial that seemed to play on an endless loop throughout the state it’s situated in. The seductive-female voiceover asked, “What’s on your summer bucket list?” and then recommended coming to this beach city.
Apparently no one thought it odd to be telling viewers that they were going to die that summer. (And so, of course, they should high-tail it to the beach before the end arrived.)
How do we define box office failure?
According to Wiki, the formula is ((total world gross box office / 2) - production budget).
It was also a ridiculously popular book long before the movie was made.