Naturally, all things Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt, but I’m finding this list of box-office bombs sort of fascinating. It’s full of plenty of no-brainers — and, I’m sure, plenty of future fuel for the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin and his regular “My Year of Flops” column — but there are a few surprises. Well, okay, one genuine surprise. Almost Famous was a bomb at the box office? Apparently, it only earned back a little more than half its budget at the domestic box office. There are some other really good movies on the list (Serenity, Slither, Solaris), and some for which I’ll admit a perhaps unhealthy fondness, but there aren’t many like Almost that have gone on to be considered a real success.
The single lowest grossing film of all time? Zyzzyx Road. It ran for just under a week in one theater in Dallas, TX, in 2006. Only six people went to see it, earning the film thirty dollars (.001% of its budget). According to Entertainment Weekly:
In truth, nobody was supposed to see Zyzzyx Road at all. The Dallas screening was never meant to be a real theatrical run. Instead, it was set up to fulfill a Screen Actors Guild agreement, which permits low-budget films to pay actors a lower rate as long as the film gets a domestic theatrical release. The Dallas ”opening” was merely a formality. ”I didn’t want an audience,” says Grillo. ”We looked at it and said, What’s the cheapest way we can get out of this mess? We rented the theater for $1,000.”
I almost want to see it now.