Hello and welcome to Monocle on Culture.
I'm Robert Bounds.
Now we talk about movie blockbusters and well loved features a lot on this show, but what about the flops of Hollywood?
Well, on today's program we're joined by Telegraph film critic and friend of the show, Tim Roby, who's released Box Office Poison Hollywood Story in a century of flops, from misunderstood debuts to disastrous sequels.
Tim's book is an alternative telling of Hollywood's history and it's a riot to read.
Roby employs both a scalpel and an ax to operate on these celluloid cadavers and runs from D.W.
griffith's On Tolerance from 1916 via Orson Welles Magnificent Ambersons to Tom Hooper's much maligned cats from 2019.
So whether you're part of the small Catwoman litter, Speed 2 Maniacs, or just a lover of big egos, ultra hubris and studio Mish explores certain box office bombs throughout history and how that conveys through the system of the silver screen, how studio execs bury their heads in the sand, how our movie darlings rise from the ashes or stay burned, and how failure simply fascinates.
But rest assured, there's tenderness and lopsided masterpieces too along the way.
Let's hear now from Tim Roby.
Yeah, so I had to narrow down the topic somehow because obviously there are many, many, many thousands of films in history that have failed or flopped.
One way I narrowed it was Hollywood only.
I thought, right, let's do that.
Partly because the statistics on box office are available for Hollywood cinema and they're simply not for many other films in other countries.
And then I thought, well, you know, some films are considered flops if they get terrible reviews.
You know, low score on Rotten Tomatoes equals flop.
But then those films can actually still make money.
Something like the Venom series, for example, they still make bank.
So I was like, no, I'll narrow it down to the ones that really did lose quite a lot of money.
The ones that didn't even come close to breaking even.