13 Movies You Presumed Were Massive Flops (That Really Weren't)
3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
A.I. is one of the most divisive films in Steven Spielberg's filmography, and was certainly one of his most anticipated, given that the project was gifted to the director from Stanley Kubrick in the mid-90s, and film fans were essentially hoping that some of Kubrick's DNA will have rubbed off on the final product. A visually stunning, beautiful and quite bizarre effort, it's fair to say that the film wasn't the breakout hit DreamWorks were hoping for, and the film's domestic box office particularly suffered.
The harsh box office at home no doubt accounted for a lot of the negative publicity stating that A.I. was an overall financial flop, but it performed extremely well overseas by comparison, and ended up taking in $235 million against $100 million. Many today view A.I. as one of Spielberg's admirable, noble failures, but both critically and commercially, the film did win out in the end, albeit more modestly than we might have hoped or expected.