Some films are so bad they’re good. Some gain a cult following. And some are just plain duds. But the biggest sin of all in Hollywood is when they lose money. In his new book Box Office Poison (Faber £16.99) Tim Robey posits an alternative history of Hollywood by looking at 100 years of notable flops from Intolerance (1916) to Cats (2019).

DW Griffith’s pioneering epic Intolerance was a portmanteau film – a series of stories on a single theme. It was most notable for its enormous Babylonian sets and while audiences stayed away in droves many critics thought it was the pinnacle of cinema achievement.

Creative differences, capsized careers, blown budgets, hubris, production delays, egomania – all play their part into making what appears a surefire winner into a flailing fiasco. At the same time vastly expensive or ambitious films often confound their critics who sniff failure yet the film is a mammoth success.

Titanic (1997) caught the public’s imagination while another ship-board movie did not. Speed (1994) in which Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock wrangled a runaway bus was followed up by Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997). Set aboard a cruise liner (not something normally associated with speed) it had none of the wit nor pace of the original. ‘The entire storyline is a clattering shambles,’ writes Robey gleefully.

One of the most famous flops was Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) which cost £44m and made less than $5m. An awful fate also befell Orson Welles’s follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941): the less than magnificent Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The project was stymied at almost every stage but its prospects were torpedoed by the advent of the attack on Pearl Harbour. Movie audiences demanded patriotic, upbeat film fare. Writes Robey: ‘with American industry mobilising [for war] a lament about the price of progress – factory smog blighting the old-world charm of the Midwest – made Welles’s film look like a fusty antique’. Preview audiences disliked it and the studio made changes not authorised by the director and generally seen as neutering the story.

Oliver Stone’s 2004 Alexander cost $155m but the US gross was a paltry $34.3m. It had been hoped it would have been as big a success as Gladiator (2000) but it tanked with audiences. Stones’s CV was a tad shaky but this spectacular epic – with Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins doing the narration – was a dud of the first order. Many critics felt that Farrell, as a fetching blond, was hopelessly miscast.

The same was said of another blond: Daniel Craig when he became the sixth 007 in the early 2000s. So critical was Sean Connery (Big Tam) to the success of the Bond franchise that when the actor refused to do another double-0 gig producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wrung their hands in despair. The first non-Sean Bond was the unknown George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), one of the most disappointing of all the Bond outings.

For many fans Connery was the Bond with his square jaw and hairy chest. He was the former milkman from Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge who became a lightning rod for the Swinging Sixties. According to Robert Sellers - in his book The Search for Bond - for Connery’s last Bond film he was ‘offered a basic fee of £1.25m, 10% of the gross and a penalty clause that if the film went over schedule the star received $10,000 per additional week’. Even at that, Connery took a week to think it over. He was desperate to be rid of the 007 typecasting and to explore other more demanding and interesting roles. Finally, he said yes, his fee used to establish the Scottish International Education Foundation aimed at supporting talented young people.

The search for new Bonds over the last 60 years drew in countless hopefuls for casting calls, boozy business lunches, auditions and screen tests. There were such unlikely candidates as the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, actor Michael Gambon and professional gambler Lord Lucan and a myriad of models and actors who looked the part. In fact, in the end more men have walked on the moon than played Bond.

Roger Moore had many admirers but many fans felt he was too much of a comic turn. Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan were forgettable. And then, in 2005 came Daniel Craig. ‘Craig tested brilliantly,’ writes Pearson. ‘It’s easy to see what was so appealing about him… There was nothing that harked back to any of the other Bond actors. He didn’t fit the mould; he was right for the times.’

As we go to press, there’s a new search for the next Bond. There’s been talk of a black, female or gay 007 reflective of the mania for diversity. ■

Info: Box Office Poison by Tim Robey (Faber £16.99). The Search for Bond by Robert Sellers (History Press £20)

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