All that changed, when the film hit the cinemas. After massing great commercial success with films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allen decided to step behind the camera for his next project, The Swarm.įeaturing strong names like Michael Caine and Henry Fonda as well as a considerable budget, The Swarm was set to be another blockbuster. Whether the irony of that title had registered with its creator is still unknown. Studios were itching for more and the man everyone looked to was Irwin Allen, the producer who was dubbed by Hollywood as “The Master of Disaster”. It was the 70s and disaster films were one of the more popular subgenres in mainstream cinema. Its domestic gross was only 8 million with Universal subsequently pulling it from most US theatres after only two weeks and opting to not release the film in Australia. Few critics praised it, but the majority were in agreement that Mann had misfired with this release.īlackhat did quite well in South-East Asia (a region in which the film takes place) but the rest of the world was not impressed. Mann’s immense experience makes the film more tolerable than it should have been, but the plot is still highly predictable and filled with a number of clichés that make the task of salvaging the film an almost impossible one. Although that is clearly not the case, the film takes on themes that were thought to have died along with the Y2K panic. The famous director’s return to the scene after a 6 year hiatus came in 2015 with an action techno thriller starring Chris Hemsworth as a brilliant hacker who can also fight like a well-trained marine (or maybe a God of thunder).Īs the film goes on, one can’t help but think that Blackhat could easily have been a project Mann wanted to do in the 90s but never had the chance to. If it wasn’t for 1983’s The Keep, Blackhat would probably be considered Mann’s worst film to this day. Michael Mann has earned himself a cult following with his work in the last two decades of the 20th century, but the bitter truth is that after Collateral he has struggled to even come close to the heights audiences have come to expect. All of this perhaps make Revolution the most forgettable film ever to negatively influence cinema in so many different levels. In the aftermath of this disaster, Al Pacino decided to take a 4 year long hiatus from acting to distance himself from the project and reevaluate his choices. The damage was so big that it rippled throughout the island’s film industry for years, deterring financing for big productions. Marketing a British film which was released out of the blue turned out to be harder than originally thought, even with names like Pacino and Donald Sutherland in the cast and Revolution made a measly 360,000 dollars in 3 weeks, out of a 28 million dollar budget, making it the biggest flop in British cinema at the time.
The theatrical cut did not vindicate expectations, with the mediocre performances being overshadowed only by the overly dramatic narration. The production was faced with many problems during shooting, but what made things worse was the decision to rush the film’s release to coincide with the Christmas market and the Academy Award season. The British war drama about the American Revolution follows a father who enlists in the militia in order to protect his young son. It takes something special to put a dent on the self-esteem of someone as talented as Al Pacino and apparently that was Revolution.
In this list we take a look at some films that were so awful that forced distributors to either severely limit their releases or pull them from circulation altogether. Although this may not always be directly related to a film’s quality, more often than not the two are connected.
With thousands of movies produced each year the line between commercial success or failure can be a blurry one.Įven though a lot of films have nowadays found a new home in streaming platforms, cinemas are still faced with tough decisions and are sometimes forced to pull films from their schedule early in order to cut their losses. It is widely accepted that we are experiencing an oversaturation of films for quite some time now.
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