Tim Robey takes us through a century of Hollywood’s flops

Gore Vidal once sighed that “every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,” and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible artistic impact, flop hideously: proof that audiences will not fork out for any arrant piece of trash.

The most recent high-profile failure of this kind was Todd Phillips’s bewilderingly poor Joker sequel, Folie à Deux, which insulted its audience and thus precipitated its commercial failure. If the Daily Telegraph film critic Tim Robey’s excellent study of the history of Hollywood duds, Box Office Poison, can be updated for a paperback edition, it would be fascinating to discover more about one of the most tuneless musicals ever made.

Robey confesses to having seen Cats four times — a diabolically awful film to which he awarded no stars in his review

Still, the twenty-six films featured here, from D.W. Griffith’s notoriously out-of-control 1916 epic Intolerance to Tom Hooper’s hilariously misguided 2019 Lloyd Webber/Eliot adaptation Cats, run the gamut of near-masterpieces (Charlie Kaufman’s wildly ambitious Synecdoche, New York; George Miller’s darker-than-dark Babe sequel, Pig in the City) to the straightforwardly dismal. Never heard of the Dan Aykroyd-directed dark comedy Nothing But Trouble or the budget-strapped Ray Bradbury adaptation A Sound of Thunder? Don’t worry, nobody else has either — save Robey, who caustically rakes over the embers of these particular burnt offerings to splendidly entertaining effect.

Still, if Box Office Poison were merely 300-odd pages of elegantly written sarcasm and bitchy invective, it would quickly become tedious. Instead, Robey sets out to champion what he terms “the medium’s weirdos, outcasts, misfits and freaks” as much as he denigrates them. He is an admirer, endearingly, of such perennially underrated pictures as Tod Browning’s disturbing circus horror film Freaks and Orson Welles’s mutilated masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons. He does a fine job, too, of arguing the case for such little-known examples as the Katherine Hepburn vehicle Sylvia Scarlett, which dealt with gender fluidity decades before the idea had entered the mainstream, and the ahead-of-its-time sci-fi adventure Speed Racer, which casts Roger Allam as its corporate villain and offers Robey the chance to make a good joke about the brothers Hitchens.

There are many intentional omissions, sometimes because the stories have been told too often (I was thankful not to have to plough through yet another account of the disastrous creations of Battlefield Earth or Heaven’s Gate) and sometimes because the films were not actually box office flops. The likes of Cleopatra and Waterworld, infamously troubled productions conceived on hubristically vast scales, both quietly crept into profit.

That is more than can be said for the “barren, wrong and disconcerting” Eddie Murphy vehicle The Adventures of Pluto Nash or the Halle Berry farrago Catwoman, of which Robey writes: “Drag Race parodies could quote this entire script and never hope to capture the singular idiocy with which it lands.” Both films, unsurprisingly, lost vast amounts of money: Pluto Nash made a mere $7.1 million on a budget of $100 million, all wasted on a film that nobody wanted to see, with Randy Quaid cast as a lascivious robot.

Robey writes with a vigor and wit that places him in the distinguished company of other great opinionated film critics, from Anthony Lane and Pauline Kael to this magazine’s Deborah Ross. Inevitably, readers will disagree with some of his value judgments, especially when it comes to contemporary cinema. Robey adores, and staunchly defends, William Friedkin’s career-ruining Wages of Fear remake, Sorcerer, but is less generous to other similarly maligned pictures.

I’m a great admirer of Terry Gilliam’s grand folly The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which Robey accurately describes as “the floppiest of all his flops;” but he’s dismissive of it not least because its horrendous production saw its female leads Sarah Polley and Uma Thurman being treated dismally. Robey sighs that “I might struggle more with the dilemma of Munchausen if I truly saw in it what some adore,” which is fair enough; but then he confesses to having seen Cats four times — a diabolically awful picture which he awarded no stars to in his Telegraph review.

But these are minor quibbles. Box Office Poison is a riotously entertaining read, packed with illuminating tales of egos run amok. Will Robey write a sequel in a few years? That may be up to Hollywood — and further cautionary examples of mega-budget hubris — to decide.