10 Films Cinemas Refused To Play (And Why)

9. The Last Temptation Of Christ

The Last Temptation Of Christ 1988
Universal Pictures

In the months leading up to its release, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ received a lot of negative attention from religious groups because of how heavily it departed from the gospels, depicting Jesus as more of a mortal man with human wants, needs and temptations.

On opening day, there were protests in New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities, with police officers forced to keep a watchful eye out for any trouble. People waiting to see the film were even scolded by angry crowds, and on the whole, it wasn't exactly a release that was met with a universal amount of excitement.

It also wasn't a release that was viewable on a nationwide scale, either, because several theatre chains - scared off by the amount of controversy surrounding the film - simply refused to book it. Chains like General Cinema and Edwards Theaters took this approach, meaning that Scorsese's epic missed out on over 3,500 extra screens.

Sadly, this lack of available screenings bled directly into the film's box-office results, and by the end of its run, it only managed to scrape together $8 million worldwide, off an estimated $7 million budget.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!