FIFTEEN MOVIES THAT FLOPPED AT THE BOX OFFICE BUT BECAME CLASSICS

Entertainment Weekly

 

15 movies that flopped at the box office but became classics

These beloved movies bombed at the box office before finding the audiences they deserved.

By Jordan Hoffman  August 28, 2026 8:35 a.m. ET

 

Sometimes you can spot a box office hit a mile away. (In 2026, if you’ve got both Tom Holland and Zendaya in your picture, you may as well put a down payment on a new house.) But movie history is loaded with examples of success working on its own timeline.

 

There are times when a film just needs a little room to find its audience. The phenomenon of the flop-turned-success includes some of the most important and beloved titles in all of cinema. The truth is, there’s no real way to predict what will catch on after an initial failure to launch.

 

Indeed, given modern viewing forms (and platforms), the mechanics of a picture’s second life are even more mysterious. Movies once found new audiences through syndication and heavy rotation on basic cable; now we’ve got to hope a stray line of dialogue makes it into a viral TikTok dub.

 

It’s impossible to guess what forgotten flop from this year or last might become tomorrow’s surprise fave. But here are 15 movies that opened to box-office crickets and are now considered classics.

 

The Big Lebowski (1998)

 

We’re starting with something of an anomaly. When Joel and Ethan Coen released The Big Lebowski in the spring of 1998, it wasn’t a financial disaster — it did okay — but few would’ve predicted the bona fide cult this head-scratching, hazy noir would later inspire. The deliberately baffling crime mystery is now a foundational text for all wiseacres and jokers, not to mention a dorm-room staple.

 

Jeff Bridges stars as “The Dude,” a White Russian-swilling slob who likes bowling and occasional coitus, and accidentally gets wrapped up in a mistaken identity/kidnapping-and-ransom scheme. The Coen brothers had just come off their Oscar-winning hit Fargo (1996), and following it up with “Fargo-but-stoned” baffled many critics and moviegoers who felt it didn’t measure up. But the bums lost, and this movie will live forever.

 

Blade Runner (1982)

 

Few movies have had as many imitators as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s mind-scrambling book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But when it was released in the summer of 1982, it faced some stiff competition — E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, and Conan the Barbarian.

 

What’s more, Harrison Ford was then best known to moviegoers as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, while Blade Runner offered something much slower and stranger: a brooding, cerebral examination of consciousness. Audiences largely took their business elsewhere, but in the years that followed, viewers came to recognize that Scott and his design team had created one of cinema’s richest and most imaginative dystopian urban landscapes. The legend grew from there.

 

Citizen Kane (1941)

 

Critics agreed with the tagline — “It’s Terrific!” — but that wasn’t enough to get people to buy tickets. For starters, William Randolph Hearst, the tycoon on whom Orson Welles not-so-subtly based his film, used his considerable power to try and make the movie disappear. His papers ignored it, refusing to run ads or reviews, while Hearst and his allies pressured exhibitors not to show it and threatened reprisals against others in Hollywood.

 

But you can’t keep revolutionary art down. Especially in Europe, critics came to recognize Citizen Kane as a dazzling synthesis of cinematic techniques, deploying deep-focus photography, expressionistic lighting, unusual editing and sound, and playful riffs on existing conventions, as in the “News on the March” prologue. By the 1950s, the movie was well on its way to being recognized as a landmark.

 

Clue (1985)

 

Clue came out the same year as New Coke, so its dumb marketing pales by comparison. When people buy a movie ticket — especially for a whodunnit — they want to see the ending, not one of three possible endings. But a gimmick idea that should have been shot down marred this outstanding comedy’s release. Three endings were shot and distributed to different theaters, so audiences saw different versions of the movie. Dumb!

 

Okay, that aside, Clue is a dopey masterpiece of slapstick and slammed doors and the late Tim Curry giving the most manic performance this side of James Cagney in One, Two, Three (1961). It made its way to cable television, where an assembly of the endings waved the boneheaded marketing away. It quickly became a quotable classic. “Flames! On the side of my face!”

 

Donnie Darko (2001)

 

Unlike Citizen Kane or Clue, nothing about Donnie Darko screams out that it should’ve been a hit. It’s a strange supernatural story that blends high school angst with time travel and alternate realities. Star Jake Gyllenhaal was mostly unknown. Its initial release, just after 9/11, wasn’t the right time for something so eerie, especially considering it had a “plane falling out of the sky” storyline. But one independent theater attached to a pizza parlor in New York City saw something in it and programmed an ongoing engagement.

 

Word of mouth spread the old-fashioned way. Once the DVD started circulating in 2002, everyone knew someone who told them about this hard-to-describe movie that was fun but also meaningful. It was a genuine phenomenon that could never be manufactured.

 

Hocus Pocus (1993)

 

Witchy comedy Hocus Pocus was not a box-office embarrassment, but few could have seen its longevity coming. The summertime release was a little curious for something best served at Halloween, and most critics didn’t think much of it. Both Siskel and Ebert waved it away like a pest. But millennials latched onto it on home video and via Disney Channel screenings. Never bet against Kathy Najimy, folks!

 

Somehow this campy comedy sits alongside Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Star Wars (1977) as movies where legit symphony orchestras play the score live to rapt audiences. A legacyquel came out in 2022 and the city of Salem, Mass., has embraced the film as part of its tourism industry. A third installment is currently in development.

 

Idiocracy (2006)

 

No one has thought about “electrolytes” the same as they did before Idiocracy, one of the most trenchant looks at American society put to film. In keeping with the movie’s theme that people are (oh, how to put this?) dumb, the suits at 20th Century Fox had no confidence in this movie, dumping it into a few theaters without any advertising. There was also speculation that Fox was nervous about offending corporate heavyweights like Costco and Starbucks.

 

And then, a miracle. When released on DVD, early internet message board culture sank its teeth into the film, making it an essential text if you wanted to understand meme culture. A perfect ending for this satirical picture.

 

The Iron Giant (1999)

 

For many, The Iron Giant is a personal favorite. (It currently boasts a 4.3 on Letterboxd.) Its longevity is a true testament to its quality, because this was another case of a screwed-up rollout. After the disappointing performance of Warner Bros.’ previous animated feature, Quest for Camelot (1998), the studio was slow to set a release date for The Iron Giant, leaving little time to mount a proper marketing campaign. The film had limited advertising and no major merchandising tie-ins. Some families still think that if there’s no toy at a fast-food chain for an animated film, it must not be important.

 

Luckily, critics praised it, and when it came to home video and cable, it got the attention it deserved. More importantly, director Brad Bird ditched Warner Bros. and found glory at Pixar with The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007).

 

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

 

There’s a great life-imitating-art aspect to It’s a Wonderful Life getting a second chance, what with it being about a guy who’s ready to hurl himself off a bridge before an angel shows him the impact he’s had on others.

 

Everyone thinks of this as a Christmastime classic, but that wasn’t always the case. Frank Capra’s movie failed to connect with audiences — possibly because of its downbeat premise, but it’s hard to know for sure. Maybe there was only room for one postwar hangover movie; The Best Years of Our Lives had come out a few weeks prior and later won Best Picture. Either way, by the mid-1970s the movie fell into the public domain, which was great for its legacy. Local television stations could air it without worrying about rights, and programming it around the holidays gave Life a second life.

 

The King of Comedy (1982)

 

Quite frankly, we’re still playing catch-up to Martin Scorsese’s eerily prescient rumination on celebrity and “stan culture.” The King of Comedy isn’t really a comedy, but it isn’t a crime epic either; it’s about a small-time schmuck played by Robert De Niro who thinks he deserves to be on television, so he kidnaps a Johnny Carson-like figure played perfectly by a seething and nasty Jerry Lewis.

 

There’s no one to root for in this cringe-fest (well, maybe Sandra Bernhard), but critics and sharp audience members recognized its greatness. Over time, it has been cited by many filmmakers as an influence, most obviously Todd Phillips when making his Oscar-winning Joker (2019).

 

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

 

Mid-’50s Hollywood was maybe not the time or place to release a surreal, stylized film about a serial killer. This is the only movie that acclaimed British actor Charles Laughton directed; its odd tone left many newspaper reviewers befuddled, and audiences by and large stayed away. But over time, critics came to recognize it as a masterpiece.

 

Its intentional use of theatrical-looking sets and highly evocative lighting eventually became a touchstone for other directors, especially David Lynch and the Coen brothers. (Spike Lee also borrowed the Robert Mitchum character’s knuckle tattoos of LOVE and HATE as adornments in Do the Right Thing.) Like Citizen Kane, it became a favorite of European critics and eventually caught on in America, too.

 

Playtime (1967)

 

Sometimes when you give a visionary a blank check to create a new world, everybody wins on the bet — like James Cameron and Avatar. Creatively, Jacques Tati’s Playtime was just as revolutionary. Investment-wise, not as much. Luckily, you and I don’t have to worry about the budget Tati spent on creating a sprawling modernist city dubbed “Tativille” for his M. Hulot alter ego to get lost in.

 

This nearly dialogue-free feature is really a collection of set pieces in which we witness how individuality is swallowed up in a mechanical urban setting. That sounds serious, but it’s actually quite funny. The production was so expensive that Tati sold the rights to his earlier work to help finance it, and Playtime’s commercial failure subsequently left him bankrupt. But a great reassessment eventually came, and now this is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

 

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

 

The Shawshank Redemption is so famous and beloved today it’s hard to remember that, at first, it was just a movie with a weird-sounding title. Audiences thought it was a Western or something, and not an emotional prison fable based on a Stephen King story. It was a financial dud, but those who did see it loved it; critics rallied and it was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

 

Then it became a hit on home video before making its way to basic cable, where Dad Movie Power took over. Andy (Tim Robbins) and Red’s (Morgan Freeman) hope in a hopeless place resonated with people, and it became the quintessential “you stop flipping channels when you see it’s on” film. It remains the top-rated movie on IMDb (9.3 out of 10), a placement it’s held for years.

 

The Thing (1982)

 

We return once more to the Summer of 1982. Unlike Blade Runner, which is a deliberately slow albeit dazzling exercise, it’s hard to explain why The Thing was a flop. It has everything — gross-outs, suspense, Wilford Brimley in long johns, you name it. But the marketplace couldn’t fit it in, and many critics were still dismissing the horror genre writ large as disposable junk. (Luckily we’ve moved past that.)

 

Nowadays, people recognize the Antarctica-set Kurt Russell film as a perfect exercise in tension, and it’s one that people mention pretty much every time there’s a snowstorm. It’s also rightly celebrated as a masterclass in tactile special effects.

 

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

 

How on Earth did audiences not immediately embrace Gene Wilder as Roald Dahl’s zany chocolatier? Especially when he’s singing “Pure Imagination”?

 

It wasn’t a disaster, but it didn’t connect like it should have. Even the movie’s ambitious product tie-in went awry; Quaker Oats’ Wonka Bars ran into production issues and were quickly abandoned.

 

Once it started airing on television, the sets, music, and especially Wilder’s performance secured it a place in pop-culture history. Repeated TV airings helped turn it into a family-viewing staple, not unlike The Wizard of Oz (1939). Maybe someday we’ll see Oompa Loompas at the Las Vegas Sphere.