What Can We Learn from Hollywood's Most Disastrous Flops?

Talking through the new book 'Box Office Poison' with author and critic Tim Robey

Tim Robey is an ace critic for the Daily Telegraph, and last week he published his first book, Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops. The book covers flops both beautiful (Sorcerer, Synecdoche New York) and repugnant (Cats, The Adventures of Pluto Nash), and in its sweep, Robey uncovers critical trends that help understand the history of cinema.

I sat with Robey to talk through some flops, what the Coen Brothers and David Lynch learned from their bombs, the especially flop-tastic 2024 film year, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Schmear Hunter
So, as they say, history is written by the victors, and that’s no different in Hollywood. But you wanted to shine some light on the losers. Why did you want to do that, and what did you learn?

Tim Robey
I set myself a challenge to write about flops because they’re so fun to cover. They make for great stories of escalating budgets and flames. I thought if I could look at the reasons behind these colossal commercial failures, it would show Hollywood’s history through failure as much as through success. Big failures shape Hollywood just as much, influencing genres, top filmmakers, and trends. I chose 26 films spanning a century to trace that ebb and flow and see what we learn along the way.

Schmear Hunter
Right. And as you say, the book covers the extent of film history, from D.W. Griffith to Cats. But how do you see flops evolving over time?

Tim Robey
They come and go, but there are different types of flops each decade. Various factors come into play—sometimes filmmaker hubris, sometimes a creative mismatch between the director and studio, and sometimes even corruption. For instance, Griffith’s Intolerance in 1916, which he funded himself, ended up bankrupting him. Fast forward to 2024, and Francis Ford Coppola is funding Megalopolis by selling his vineyards. It’s the end of Coppola's life, and he chose to do this, though I doubt he expected it to turn a profit. Griffith truly thought Intolerance would be his next Birth of a Nation—he was completely wrong.

Schmear Hunter
So no two flops are the same, but sometimes you can tell when a movie is heading south. What are some telltale signs that a film will flop? 

Tim Robey
Runaway expenditure is the main one. When a studio realizes it’s too deep and starts to panic, or when the marketing team says, “We don’t know how we’re going to sell this.” Take David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune — Universal thought they could market it as the next Star Wars without realizing Lynch was making a surreal, sexually perverse film. Dino De Laurentiis thought he could make it cheaply in Mexico, but corruption disrupted everything—items were stolen at airports, and dailies went missing. The production was chaotic, and that kind of chaos—along with natural disasters—afflicts many of these films, making them feel cursed.

Dune (1984)

Schmear Hunter
What’s the worst film you wrote about for this book, and why is that movie so bad?

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