We are not singers, We are song writers.

If a film loses a metric shit ton of money at the box office,  does that make it a bad movie?

Hell no.

We are not here to dunk on films that couldn't bring in the benjamins. 

In fact, we want to  lift some movies up and say “ What were people thinking!?” 

Here are our picks for some of the best box office bombs of all time.

BUDGET: $55,000,000     EARNINGS: $14,000,000    TOTAL LOSS: 96 million (est) BUT if you adjust for inflation...  A whopping 213,000,000 in losses.

Damn.

To close out B.O.B. week we had to end with one of the biggest bombs of all time, directed by one of our most under-appreciated auteurs.

Ishtar bombed hard and was panned by critics and audiences alike; truly the Morbius of its day.

When we say the movie was panned we mean like absolutely loathed. The conversation wasn’t even “wow this is bad”, but “how dare you make something this awful”.

The problem with that conversation is this: if it’s so culturally ubiquitous as a bad film, how can everyone have such a strong opinion about this film if nobody went to see it? I mean this movie is synonymous with bad filmmaking.

If you ask the film's director, Elaine May, she’ll tell you: “If everyone who hated Ishtar saw it I would be a very rich woman”. 

Well, there are two important factors to consider:

First and foremost the film bombed hard because it had an incredibly inflated budget coming in at fifty-one million dollars (twenty-three million over its initial budget of twenty-eight), so it was already an uphill battle to make its money back, never mind turning a profit!

But what about its stars?

Surely Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in the 80s could help it crawl its way out of the red and into the black?  

That brings us to the second problem the film ran into. The movie stars at that time are very different from the stars now.

Unlike today, where Ryan Reynolds is constantly in your social media feed selling you gin and The Rock makes six passionless films a year, audiences saw their stars once every couple of years, which made the expectations for each star incredibly high. 

In the case of this movie, Warren Beatty hadn’t made a movie in six years and Hoffman’s last movie was “Tootsie” five years earlier. Let’s just say audiences were not expecting a movie that so completely plays against their lead’s personas as Ishtar does.

All that being said, the film has gone through a sort of reclamation by audiences, something that will never happen to Morbius.

Now audiences are able to look past their expectations and see it for what it is: a fun pastiche that pays homage to “The Road Pictures”, a series of comedies from the fifties starring ‘Hope & Crosby’.

The film is about two men who are trying to be the next ‘Simon & Garfunkel’ and they have everything it takes to do it: passion, a deep catalog of songs, trust funds, and an agent.

All they’re missing is… talent.

It’s the hilarious tale of these two men trying to make it big through a series of events that range from playing casino night in the titular Ishtar, to falling smack dab in the middle of a civil war in the middle east. 

You know, that tired old plot.

This hilarious clip from early in the film, before the plot kicks in, and we the audience get to just sit and enjoy watching two fundamentally untalented men try and prove that they are the next big thing.