Bad news this week for anyone involved with the new thriller Momentum. In short, the film doesn’t have any. Despite a recognisable cast (Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, James Purefoy) and a wham-bam, Bourne-lite feel, Momentum made just £46 over the weekend from its 10-screen UK release. That works out at a screen average of £4.60. A cinemagoer doesn’t normally need to try very hard to spend more than that on pick’n’mix.
It’s true that Momentum looks like a blockbuster smash compared with the recent comedy Addicted to Fresno, which reported £16 in takings in the course of an October weekend at one London cinema. But that will be cold comfort to the makers of Momentum, who deliberately left open the final scene to allow for multiple sequels. They might look instead to the words of Steven Soderbergh, who has been sanguine about his own box office failures, such as The Good German, saying: “Twenty years from now we’ll figure out which ones are great and which ones aren’t.”
That sounds like a sane argument to me. Audiences should always suspect the party line and doubt the consensus. I’m not saying that Momentum is a masterpiece – I haven’t seen it – but it’s never good to allow box-office takings to become a benchmark of quality. If that were the case, the two poorest Pirates of the Caribbean films would be among the 10 greatest works in the history of cinema.
Movies do carry a certain smell with them – the perfume of success and approbation, the stink of failure and rejection. But when I think of all the years I avoided watching Ishtar simply because of its reputation as a flop, I feel rather ashamed. I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. “If all the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I’d be a rich woman today,” said its director, Elaine May.
I was in my mid-20s before I took the massive chance of actually forming my own opinion about this movie, which had become synonymous with Hollywood hubris. In fact, May’s 1987 comedy about two idiotic Americans en route to Morocco was far ahead of its time, and littered with coruscating dialogue, insights and comic vignettes. A film this sophisticated was never likely to recoup a $55m budget. (It is reported to have made a net loss of $40.6m.) But who cares now what its stars, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, were paid, and whether those costs were justified? All that matters is whether the picture works.
If there really are people who watch decades-old movies with a balance sheet to hand, weighing up the costs in relation to the grosses adjusted for inflation, then I would hope not to find myself sitting next to them at my local cinema, or else the pick’n’mix will hit the fan.
Like Michael Cimino’s costly 1980 western Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar is an extreme example of a movie that became a punchbag for all the indulgences of the industry in the 1980s. Some pictures worthy of the film maudit (cursed film) tag haven’t even had the luxury of this 15 minutes of infamy. Few people speak highly any more of Ang Lee’s American civil war western Ride with the Devil, though it was released only 16 years ago. With a total cost of $38m and a domestic gross of $635,000, it made a net loss in the US of $37.4m. It’s not hard to see why it didn’t catch fire in the multiplexes of the midwest and beyond: it dares to frustrate our expectations by turning away from combat in its second half in favour of a ruminative approach to conflict. It was the opening movie of the London Film Festival in 1999 but you’d be lucky now to find it in a petrol-station bargain bin.
With critics alert to lost masterpieces-in-the-making or to new releases that need rescuing from pre-emptive neglect at the hands of unsympathetic studios, a movie can sometimes be rescued in advance. A recent example is Kenneth Lonergan’s sprawling but rewarding drama Margaret, starring Anna Paquin, which was saved from near-certain obscurity by a concerted critical campaign to get it seen.
But there is still plenty of worthwhile work that rumour and poor receipts would have you believe deserves to be overlooked. There’s Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, a meticulously detailed three-hour recreation of a scuzzy 1970s movie-going experience, complete with fake trailers. (It made a $42m loss.) Or Gus Van Sant’s almost frame-for-frame remake of Psycho, which is daring and witty.
Or Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, which went through untold production woes – sets built and destroyed, actors injured – to become France’s most expensive film at that time. It happens also to be one of its most gorgeous and brilliant, even now.
There’s an inevitable element of reflected glory in defending the unloved. “Time is going to be kind to all the movies I like that you dislike,” joked the critic Scott Tobias in 2012. But all it comes down to is being true to your own opinion. When most critics and industry figures were smacking their lips over the box-office failure of The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp, the late Philip French disregarded the profit margin and concentrated instead on its value (he called it “a handsome, exciting, affectionate movie”). We should all follow that example, especially when the temptation is to pile in and give some poor film a jolly good Ishtarring.
