What movie you saw in the theater had the lowest box office total?

Was it that the children were racists or that the documentarians was racist? It has been a while since I’ve seen any of the Ups. Someone should start a thread.

Fair enough, but for me I basically check the listings for the 3 or 4 local indy theaters (or big chains too) every week and see if anything catches my interest. More often than not I go, and I try to avoid reviews most of the time. Also the occasional niche documentary or non-standard screening (i.e. local deals or one time screenings or panel type things). That’s about the extent I’m willing to go to see a movie. I’m not really into the art of movie making, I just like watching them. Seeing movies “smaller” than most of the ones listed here in the theater would require more effort than I’m usually willing to put in. And I am probably not sophisticated enough to get them anyway.

There is the local micro-theater with limited seating and a small screen, but I’m just not that into it unless it’s something I really want to see (in which case it’s probably a viewing of something that is not in it’s first run anyway).

There is such a cross section of the world here I can forget that not everyone was a hipster in a college town as a kid. I actually went to see the African Queen at the Brattle (The Bogart revival of the 60s) and King of Hearts at the Central Sq in Cambridge, (ran for years and years) back in the day, both of which are fairly healthy footnotes in the history of showing movies in the US.

But it’s not rare for people to have seen lots of small movies if they are in a city or go to school for it, or just grew up in the post punk indie environment. Nobody in my cohort would think it was strange. But the business of going to the theater is changing. I don’t know if box office measures anything anymore.

The interviewers were, and it didn’t matter that one of the kids is black.

We might be coming into an era where most people have forgotten that in the not too distant past, shitty movies went into theaters and we went to watch them because we didn’t have the internet yet. The further back you go the shittier the movies could get. And I’m sure there are some movies with 0 or negative box office. There’s no winner.

Citing gimme danger is weird. I just got it at the library and it’s great. It isn’t very old, and the subject matter just happens to be a guy who never sold 1000 records when he was making them (The first three) and has been the picture in the dictionary next to lou reed of the cult guy who is influential over time (translation : No box office whatsoever for a few decades for Iggy. Sales had nothing to do with who heard those records and what happened next)

The box offices of movies about warhol or iggy or crumb are kind of irrelevant. They are cultural events. I haven’t seen them all. But you are aware of them by reading the press generally or, at least you used to when we had a weekly printed alternative press, like the one that SD started in.

The movies were well regarded and won awards against the competition. That isn’t small. In fact for the docs that was the big success longed for and attained.

Saw it in a theater in Kansas City,

I’ve seen a crap-load of small theater art-house stuff, so too many to mention or easily remember. The most recent, which was actually pretty good, was Colossal.

Japanese story. $4,520,000 AUD at the Au box office. (Probably about 3M USD). Won the AFI award for best picture in 2003 – this was the movie that killed the AFI awards. After this turkey, winning the Aus Film Institute best picture award was the kiss of death.

Saw it in a big commercial theatre with about 3 other people.

I saw Truly, Madly, Deeply, which grossed US$1.5 million. Co-star was Alan Rickman, but not nearly as funny as Galaxy Quest.

I saw Code 46 at the TIFF screening. It grossed under $200K in the states.

-DF

Probably Liquid Sky which, at $1.7m, ironically was the highest-grossing indie film of 1983. That’s total gross though; I’m not sure how to carve out the US-only gross. And it only cost $500,000 to make, so they presumably did okay out of it.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I knew a guy who was friends with the schlockmeister Andy Sidaris, so he always had little parts in Andy’s movies.

They kind of all run together for me, but I think Malibu Express kind of sums them all up.

IIRC I saw this one in a theatre in Times Square.

Later on Sidaris sold these movies to cable and so made something, I guess, but geez … how much could he have made? $1.98?

My friend is not hard to spot in these movies, he’s always the doofus. (He also played the doofus in at least one movie for North Carolina auteur Earl Owensby – look him up sometime – so I guess he was typecast.)

They’re so bad they’re kinda good, you’ll laugh. I do, anyway.

I attended the 1968 Algiers Film Festival of pictures from socialist countries. Can’t remember any specific films, but there were probably some that have even slipped through the IMDB net, like made in Angola or someplace. All screenings were in conventional big screen houses.

I saw “V gorode S.” on a big screen in Romania, and I’m the only person to write a review of for IMDB, so it must be pretty obscure. Cant find any details.

In 1988 I saw Vice Versa, starring Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage and a father and son who switch minds due to a magical artifact. According to Wikipedia it grossed $13,664,060 at the box office in the United States. My friend and I were the only two people in the theater when we saw it. I also saw My Stepmother is an Alien in that same year which grossed $13,854,000 at the box office. There were more than two people in the theater this time.

So Vice Versa wins in this particular case.

I saw that (most of it anyway) a few weeks ago. It’s one of the handful of *MST3K *offerings Netflix streams. I was figuring poor Roddy must have been desperate for a paycheck.

Back in a year that I now conclude must have been 2003, I decided to see if I could go to at least one movie every single weekend. That lead to some particularly poor choices, including:

The Trip - $306,567
XX/XY - $104,130

I also saw and enjoyed the 2001 Scott Baio movie The Bread, My Sweet, which made a respectable $1,023,156

Sheesh. The OP simply asked what movies we had seen in the theater that had the lowest box office totals. I’m sorry I brought up Gimme Danger, I had no idea it wouldn’t live up to your standards of acceptable answers to that simple question. I promise I wasn’t trying to make any larger point about the film industry, or advertising, or the cultural impact of these films, or anything else. I simply tried to think of movies I remembered seeing in the theater that probably had low box office returns and then googled what their box office was.

Where did you see Pi?

I saw it at the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak, MI.

I’ve seen lots of art movies over the years that probably didn’t earn much. I’ll pick one and go with “The Living End” which earned $692,585.

A friend of mine and I saw the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby in a big theater, which was later subdivided into a multiplex. We were about 15, and bored out of our minds. We two were the only people in the theater. We had to wait for one of our parents to pick us up (this was decades pre-Uber), so we had to stay in the theater. We wandered all over the place, saw where every exit went. Awful, dull movie. I think we were there to see another movie, but after we were dropped off we found out we were too young to get in unaccompanied.

I looked it up on IMDB and am shocked that is had more box office than its budget: $26.5M in, versus an estimated $6.5M spent. I can assure you it didn’t make dime one of profit in the Stanley-Warner theater in Paramus, NJ that afternoon.