10 Critical Darling Movies That Were Shot Dead At The Box Office

Audiences loved it, critics loved it, you watched it more times than you can count on the wheel-in TV in high school, and yet The Shawshank Redemption made just two-thirds of its $25 million budget on its initial run.

Ridiculous though it may seem today, as Shawshank frequently makes all-time top-10s (including Empire's readers voting it in at number one in 2006), hardly anyone turned up to see the film.

There seem to be a myriad of reasons all working against the picture that, ultimately, amounted to a kind of overwhelming cosmic bad luck, not least of them was that it found itself in direct competition with Pulp Fiction and the hugely successful Forrest Gump. Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins have also suggested that the odd and uninviting title didn't help.

But, ever the redemption tale, Shawshank was re-released for a second run after receiving Oscar nominations the following year and ended up taking a global total of $58.3 million, finally turning a slender profit. In decades to come, however, the film turned profits into the hundreds of millions through home media releases.