10 Box Office Failures That Are Actually Brilliant

7. Speed Racer

With their notoriously panned and hated upon follow up to The Matrix Revolutions, Speed Racer, the Wachowski siblings set out to do one thing: craft a movie that looked and felt like an anime cartoon. Say what you will about its unrelenting hyperactivity, wacky characters, and questionable story, then, but that's exactly what they achieved. So, of course, Speed Racer flopped at the box office - the source material, after all, wasn't familiar enough to western audiences, the lead actor was Emile Hirsch, and - viewed in trailer form - the movie looked super incomprehensible. Critics panned Speed Racer for its "headache-inducing special effects," as if that wasn't the point: watching Speed Racer is like being shrunk down, forced inside a bubblegum machine, and drip-fed LCD. If anime were rendered real, after all, this is probably what it would look like. The most criminally neglected aspect of Speed Racer, however, is in its willingness to embrace innocence; it's an adrenaline-fueled ride that appeals to our inherent childlike sense of adventure and wonder. And coated beneath all those layers of sugar, there's actually a lot heart here, too.