I’m not talking about box office here: Plenty of films do poorly in their initial release and then do well afterwards for purely boring reasons like studio politics preventing a proper marketing campaign, and plenty of films have a good opening weekend and then do precisely nothing afterwards because they made a big splash and were so bad nobody wanted to see them twice.
I’m talking about films where the consensus of reviewers (usually called “critics”) has shifted dramatically. One example is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which was hated by reviewers when it was first released and is now one of canonical horror/science-fiction genre merges. I can’t think of any film going the other way, from loved by reviewers to being panned now.
Moving away from film, the novel Moby-Dick got mixed reviews, and now it’s universally seen as one of the greatest English-language novels.
When I was in college, it was just kin of assumed that Jerzy Kozinski would wind up in the Pantheon of Important Writers and that Jim Thompson would not, and pretty much the opposite happened. Authors don’t find their place in the literary canon during their lifetime, usually; when my father went to high school in the 30s, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens were not yet considered serious literature. When I was in high school, JRR Tolkein was kind of a niche oddity.
Johann Sebastian Bach was primarily known as a talented organist during his life but was heavily overshadowed as a composer by his talented sons. Bach’s music for the last half of his life was seen as stodgy, old-fashioned and dull and he struggled to get it played anywhere (or anywhere he wasn’t personally in charge of the music). He was “rediscovered” in the 19th century and the rest is history.
The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde was dragged over it’s supposed glorification of violence and so on. But a few reviewers loved it and started touting it. In particular Pauline Kael wrote an essay praising it. Turned both the film’s assessment and her career around.
I almost included that one, but from reading the Wikipedia page its reception wasn’t exactly universally rapturous. It was a box office success, but not a huge critical darling.
Ishtar was badly panned when it came out (with a few notable exceptions) and got the reputation of being a terrible movie. Nowadays, most critics think it’s pretty good overall.
Duck Soup by the Marx Brothers was a major flop, but now is considered one of their best.
Crash was loved by critics when it first came out, but after it won the Oscar, its reputation fell precipitously (I disagree, especially since most people who sneer at it don’t understand its point).
Well, Manhattan’s free ride is over, though not because of the film’s actual merits. Quite a few critical darlings from circa 1979 have either gotten downgraded (Heaven’s Gate, The Deer Hunter, I think there was just a feeling of Michael Cimino fatigue) or unaccountably dropped off the radar (Reds and **Breaking Away **were freakin’ huge when they were in the theaters!). And not to keep picking on poor Jerzy Kozinski, but Being There kind of started the trend of movies you see once, profess to their awe to anybody who will listen, and then never think about them again.
I always wondered why Multiplicity never got the same love as Groundhog Day; it had a lot of the same elements going for it. I think this was made around the time Bill Murray stopped taking Harold Ramis’s phone calls, so they had to “settle” for Michael Keaton.
I was never aware of Heaven’s Gate being a “critical darling.” Quite the contrary, it was almost universally hated by critics, and it lost so much money that it’s often been pointed to as the film that ended the practice of hot young directors being given lavish budgets and almost no studio oversight. It also seriously damaged Kris Kristofferson’s reputation as an actor.
There has been something of a reassessment of Heaven’s Gate more recently, and a feeling has emerged that many of those early reviews were a sort of critical pile-on against Cimino, based more on his personality and on the film’s troubled production than on its actual merits.