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A century of Hollywood’s spectacular flops

From D.W. Griffiths’s 1916 epic Intolerance to Tom Hooper’s hilariously misjudged Cats, 26 films provide cautionary examples of mega-budget hubris

23 November 2024

9:00 AM

23 November 2024

9:00 AM

Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops Tim Robey

Faber, pp.334, 16.99

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.

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