12 Movies That Were Dead On Arrival

The tagline of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of the controversial Nabakov novel was “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” By 1997, you could replace the “How” with a “Why”. It’s safe to say that the world was not clamouring for another version of the Russian author’s tale of a professor lusting after an underage girl, and unsurprisingly, it did not clean up at the box office.

The intention was to make an adaptation which better resembled the source material, but director Adrian Lynne and screenwriter Stephen Schiff miss the mark considerably. While the narrative is written with the novel in mind, this po-faced melodrama lacks the venomous dark humour of Nabakov’s prose - something Kubrick’s blackly irreverent version had a grip on, even if he divulged more from the source material.

While the 1962 version naughtily courts controversy, the 1997 remake insists we take terribly seriously a novel which is as much a wryly told road story as it is a dramatic exploration of a sexual abuser. It barely reclaimed a sixtieth of its budget - it takes real work to turn something this incendiary into such a dull film.