20 Incredible Recent Movies That FLOPPED

Though Gus Van Sant's new film Dead Man's Wire didn't make much of a dent on the awards circuit, it was still widely lauded for Bill Skarsgård's magnetic central performance and its punchy, darkly comedic tone.

Even if you know the outcome of this dramatisation of the 1977 standoff where Tony Kiritsis held his mortgage broker hostage, Dead Man's Wire is still a terrifically taut time, elevated by Skarsgård's arguably career-best work, a sharp script, and faultless period production design.

But none of this helped it much at the box office, where it topped out at $3.8 million - just a fraction of its estimated $13 million budget.

While Gus Van Sant is one of the most beloved and acclaimed filmmakers of his generation, his name has never carried much mainstream commercial clout, and it probably didn't help that this was the first movie from new distributor Row K Entertainment, who didn't exactly give it much marketing juice.

We can only hope that the film gets the second life on streaming that it so thoroughly deserves.