On paper, how does this film have any less potential than* Forrest Gump*?
The budget, for one. Even with inflation, FG cost about 2/3rd of WtM.
Aside from that, “hapless lovelorn hero strolls through history” is quirky but I believe still not as quirky as “beaten transvestite builds models and fantasies about them”. YMMV.
I don’t see how you get a smaller production budget for Forrest Gump. Gump cost $55 million in 1994, or about $93 million, using the CPI to adjust for inflation. This film had a production budget of about $39 million.
My mistake, I added in promotion costs for WtM but not FG. However, my inflation calculator put $55M(1994) at about $88M in 2018 dollars and the deadline article listed the WtM production budget at around $40-50M, not 39.
I loathe FG with the fire of a thousand suns, but I can acknowledge that with the iconic Sixties music and all the action set in historical touchstones, plus the sappy love story at the heart of it all, it had box office potential.
I looked at the entire RT list of upcoming releases, and I don’t see any dramas with that kind of budget other than a Tom Hanks WWII vehicle, which seems a much safer bet. “Marwen” is a rare and odd bird.
BTW, I don’t hate all Zemeckis films. I actually quite liked “Flight”, thought it was underrated.
Oh goodness. That’s way too sad. No way I could watch that. 
My gf took me to see it. My prior knowledge going in was seeing a commercial or two, with no familiarity with the true story or other documentary.
It made my gf cry and cry by the end. I thought it was touching. I guess I excused all the awkwardness in the movie as things being affected by the guy’s perspective- characters were either somewhat humoring him because he was the town damaged guy, or else they were sort of flat because the guy didn’t perceive things normally. To me, it made his struggle to connect with people more sad- the characters seemed to want to meet him halfway out of kindness I suppose, but even then he couldn’t really manage it, which I found to be genuinely sad and human. And he sticks with his childish/damaged approach to things all the way through to a victory of sorts, which at least seemed like a new kind of story.
I was surprised at how scathing the reviews were. OTOH, I am someone who was subjected to a hate crime beating myself, without even engaging in cross dressing, and I could gauge my relative not-permanently-fucked-upedness against the character, laugh at what really struck me as the big fantasy in the movie, which is the notion of extant justice (justice is actually merely a word), and basically get ambushed by having my baggage dragged out by a random film. Others’ milage will surely vary.