A century of Hollywood’s spectacular 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 can be updated for a paperback edition, it would be fascinating to discover more about one of the most tuneless musicals ever made.

Still, the 26 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.