As soon as anyone starts learning about the film business, we’re fed the idea that box-office flops are bad. Bad for the industry – all that wasteful splurging! Bad for directors and stars – after Showgirls (1995), name one film you’ve seen Elizabeth Berkley in? Bad for viewers – anyone unfortunate enough to be sat there in a near-empty auditorium as the lights come down.
The most dubious assumption is that flops must be bad in themselves. Losing money is held as the incontrovertible proof of a film botching its assignment. There’s a lot of this going around in 2024, with the twinned debacles of Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed Megalopolis and the doomed sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. The headlines conflate creative and commercial disaster as if they’re always two sides of the same coin. Yes, they may often line up, but the general prejudice needs to be unlearned.
