10 Terrible Ideas That Became Great Movies
9. A Film Set Almost Entirely Inside A Phone Booth - Phone Booth
Movies where characters are trapped in a single location for basically the entire runtime are always a risk, but at least something like Ryan Reynolds' Buried could sell itself on the inherent anxiety of being buried alive.
Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth, however, had the decidedly more pedestrian setting of a New York City phone booth, where protagonist Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell) was held hostage by a sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) with a grudge.
You can practically picture a studio executive shaking their head the moment somebody pitched this to them, because while a single location is an easy way to keep a movie's budget down, that location generally needs to be cinematically compelling. A phone booth? Not so much.
Thankfully Phone Booth had a hell of a lot going for it - Schumacher's dynamic direction, which regularly deploys 24-style split screens, a tight, witty script, and a superb central performance from Colin Farrell, who dominates the screen in basically every single shot.
20 years (!) on, it remains one of the all-time best single-location thrillers, proving how smart filmmaking and strong acting can make the most of an unassuming setting.