11 Hated Sci-Fi Movies That Became Cult Classics
They just didn't find an audience. Until...
Too often, a film will be released to minor or even cold reception. Critics, whether they champion or blast the picture, don't account for a movie's audience, often going against whatever the reviews say. But word of mouth spreads fast, and even a moderate success the first week can crash the second if audiences despise it.
In other instances, studios just don't know what to do with their product and dump it in the early graveyard of the early months of the year, prior to the major blockbusters and Oscar bait in the coming months.
Either way, a lot of films get buried in the mix and fail to find an audience. If the internet has proven anything, it's that there is an audience for just about anything, and they will find one another and the film in question will suddenly be up for re-appraisal and, for the studio, re-release on DVD with upgrades.
Science fiction, already a niche genre, even has some of its seminal work start out as small, cult hits. Here are just a few beloved films that, at first, didn't catch.
11. The Thing
When Guillermo Del Toro sat down for lunch with director John Carpenter for the first time, he couldn't help but geek out. He burst with admiration, talking about how he grew up loving Carpenter's alien invasion thriller The Thing. Carpenter shrugged, seemingly bitter about how poor it did upon release, damning him throughout the 80s to scrounge for money to finance his films.
How, one wonders, could a masterpiece like The Thing fail at the box office? Some credit the popularity of E.T. and other, more optimistic spaceman movies of 1982, which look and feel like idealistic fantasy compared to the stark, brutal and cynical Carpenter film.
Since, however, it's undergone re-evaluation and retained a fanbase strong enough for a video game sequel (in which Carpenter provides a voice), a prequel and a series of imitators throughout the following two decades. None nailled down the chilly, paranoid atmosphere that Carpenter brought to the picture, at once both gorily extreme and quietly eerie.