10 Failed Movies That Became Cult Classics
4. The Fountain
Over a decade before Darren Aronofsky confounded audiences and critics alike with mother!, he befuddled everyone with his glossy existential fantasy epic The Fountain, a tripartite, millennium-spanning meditation on love, life and death.
Even with its fairly modest $35 million budget given the ambition and visual majesty of the project, it tanked with audiences and failed to gross even half its price tag, while critics were and remain enormously mixed on it.
But just like mother!, the movie has its fans for sure, with Aronofsky's signature arresting visuals, loose spiritualist themes and, of course, a killer Clint Mansell musical score preventing The Fountain from fading into obscurity.
If you can swallow down some of Aronofsky's more heavy-handed and arguably "pretentious" symbolism, there is a sumptuous, emotional feast of a movie in here. And you can almost watch it thrice in the time it takes to watch Heaven's Gate, so there's that.