10 Failed Movies That Only Found Their Audience On TV
8. Donnie Darko (2001)
A movie with cult following written all over it, Donnie Darko wouldve gone straight to video but for Drew Barrymores production company, who secured a limited theatrical release in October 2001. Shown in 58 cinemas, the movie made $517,375 during its four-week run, recouping only a fraction of its $4.5 million production budget. After failing to generate much excitement among critics, and having proved a washout at Sundance, the film was left for dead until it found its true audience on VHS. Word of mouth was so strong, in fact, that the film was re-released in a two-disc Directors Cut edition in 2004, which reinstates twenty minutes of footage and helped bring about a critical re-evaluation. The movie remains impenetrable to logical analysis, wrote Roger Ebert, but now I ask myself: what logical analysis would explain the presence of a 6 foot tall rabbit with what looks like the head of a science fiction insect?
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
