Blade Runner was a box office disappointment, if not a failure. I’ve known people who were into the soundtrack or who could quote it at length. I think it led to wider interest in P.K. Dick’s work, both the source book and others. If I remember right, the source novel was reprinted as a movie tie-in. I also think it influenced later science fiction films, particularly in terms of how cities look.
I don’t know how Yojimbo did on first release, but I suspect that only a minority of Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis fans know that their guy was in a remake of it.
Rocky Horror Picture Show is another one that did badly on release. Unlike Idiocracy and Office Space (both Mike Judge films, coincidentally), it didn’t find its audience on video but, of course, on midnight showings.
Bringing Up Baby was a flop and got Hepburn a reputation for box office poison. It may have popularized the current meaning of “gay”.
John Carpenter’s The Thing was a box office disappointment, and is now a horror classic.
** Sullivan’s Travels** was a box office bomb, and is remembered by few today (though regarded as a classic by film historians). The fictional movie director in the film wanted to make a socially important movie, to be entitled “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” before he learned his lesson that what audiences really wanted was a good comedy. The Coen brothers took the message of the movie to heart and also stole the title of the fictional script within the movie and we got O Brother Where Art Thou?
I can’t believe nobody has yet mentioned “This Is Spinal Tap”. It was not in general release when it came out in 1984, but it did play in Des Moines, where I lived at the time, and by the time its theatrical run ended, senior citizens were coming to see it and saying, “We have got to find out if this movie really is as funny as everyone says it is!” My sibs worked there, so I got in free, and when I first saw the “choking on vomit” scene, I never heard a movie audience howl so loudly until I saw “About Schmidt” on opening weekend, and we didn’t know about the Kathy Bates nude scene :eek: either!
IIRC, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was a box office disappointment that came into its own on rental/dvd.
Speaking of Myers, it’s not very frequent but I hear people quote So I Married An Axe Murderer occasionally (Youtube has a buttload of parody poetry readings) and I don’t recall that doing well either.
Indeed. I don’t know if it really counts as a flop, but I bet a lot of people who use the BBC iPlayer do not know why the volume slider goes to eleven. (I am sure there are many who do know, too.)
My first thought on seeing the OP was “Pay it Forward,” with Haley Joel Osment. I never saw the movie and I don’t think it did really well, but since that time I’ve heard the phrase quite a bit.
Forbidden Planet was the first movie, AFAIK, that had humans using Faster-Than-Light drive for interstellar travel. other movies tried to show people going deep into space, although they didn’t necessarily say how far (Things to Come, for instance, or the Flash Gordon serials, which were kinda vague about where Mongo was supposed to be). But virtually all human space travel in movies before then – including destination Moon and Rocketship X-M 9which was rushed into production to beat Destination Moon to market) kept it inside the solar system.
Forbidden planet also gave us:
Human beings traveling in a “flying saucer”, non-cigar-shaped vehicle for the first time.
A robot that obeyed Asimov’s Laws of Robotics (although those aren’t named), and even uses this to emphasize a key plot point.
A robot with an Emergency Override
“Stasis fields” to counteract the inertia that would tear people apart when the accelerated or decelerated
Electronic scoring for the first time in a major film
The film probably would have done better if it had been properly marketed and releadsed as a Summer Blockbuster or a Christmas Blockbuster, but this was well before they started doing those things. There was no buildup, no major marketing of toys 9although there were a LOT of cheap knock-off Robbie toys), and they simply hadn’t learned the lessons they would from the 1960s about marketing and tie-ins, and which were really knocked home with the juggernaut that was Star Wars.
Oh, yeah, just to add – Forbidden Planet was arguably the first big SF movies to introduce what had been common sweeping SF themes to the general public (FTL travel, Robots that obeyed reasonable laws, non-cigar ships, abandoned alien civilization, etc). even if the public didn’t see it, the aftereffects lingered. The sets and props showed up endlessly in The Twilight Zone, as did the attitude towards SF.
Gene Roddenbery undoubtedly strip-mined FP for his series Star Trek – saucer-like FTL ship, military structire, the triumvirate of Captain, Second in Command, and Ship’s Doctor going offf from the ship to represent their organization. even the Captain getting the girl. And, of course, the reverence for good SF that lead Roddenbery to get a bunch of SF writers to do his scripts (Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Jerome Bixby, one story credited (although he had nothing directly do to with the script) to Fredric Brown, and the up-and-coming David Gerrold).
And Star Trek, of course, had immense influence outside the small community of SF aficionados.
