’70s Movie Flops That Turned Into Big Hits

The 1970s were an interesting time for movies. Older generations had begun to age out of going to the theater, so Hollywood started courting younger audiences, trying to create future cinema fans in the closing years of the ’60s and into the start of the ’70s. As part of that attempt to shift attention, a new wave of younger filmmakers started cropping up, bringing a youthful — and in many cases, much more edgy — atmosphere to the world of film.

Unfortunately, an economic downturn made rough going for a lot of movies in the first half of the decade. Then, after “Jaws” was released in 1975 and invented the concept of a Hollywood blockbuster, the rest of the ’70s were dominated by other tentpole films, which made it hard for smaller flicks to win attention. 

As such, there are a lot of movies that, today, are considered to either be cult hits or outright classics, despite having underperformed at the box office. While there is no shortage of underrated ’70s movies you need to watch, these are the films that get plenty of acclaim today but took decades to earn it. 

Among the many untold truths of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” is that the book’s author, Roald Dahl, wasn’t happy with how the movie turned out. While that might seem weird, given that Dahl also wrote the film himself, his script actually received an uncredited rewrite by David Seltzer that significantly changed his original draft. The revised version was so different that Dahl all but disowned the movie. 

Initially, Dahl’s apathy towards “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” was shared by the moviegoing public. Despite a fairly modest-for-its-time production budget of $4 million, the movie barely made $3 million at the box office. When factoring in marketing costs and additional budget concerns, that means it failed to break even, let alone turn a profit. If it feels like “Willy Wonka” was a huge hit, though, that’s because it eventually found an audience through television airings, theatrical re-releases, and, eventually, home video sales. 

The movie has made its money back and then some. More importantly, it is now considered a timeless classic that continues to be rediscovered — and subsequently beloved — by each new generation of children, over 50 years after its original release. 

We mentioned “Jaws” and how it reshaped the way Hollywood looked at successful movies. Needless to say, it also had an impact on the career of its director, Steven Spielberg, who — “1941” notwithstanding — would go on to fire off an unprecedented run of movies that were both box office smashes as well as critical darlings. Pre-“Jaws,” Spielberg only had one other major theatrical release under his belt, the 1974 crime drama-comedy “The Sugarland Express.”

In Looper’s ranking of every Steven Spielberg movie, we put “The Sugarland Express” at a respectable number 18, just ahead of “Munich.” In fairness, for a movie from an unknown director and starring an actor — Goldie Hawn — that was still mostly known for her sketch comedy work, the movie’s $7 million haul doesn’t seem terrible. But Universal Pictures, the movie’s distributor, wasn’t impressed. They pulled “The Sugarland Express” from theaters after just two weeks. 

Had Spielberg not blown up the following year with “Jaws,” and had Hawn not subsequently become one of the biggest leading ladies of her generation, it is likely “The Sugarland Express” would’ve faded into obscurity. Luckily, as people dug back into the early filmographies of both figures, “The Sugarland Express” was rediscovered. Today, it is now considered an early underrated gem in both of their careers.

The 1970s was the decade of modestly-budgeted horror movies that went on to become massive hits. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “Halloween,” “Dawn of the Dead,” there are dozens of iconic examples. But there are also fairly cheaply made several horror movies that couldn’t even make their measly budgets back, yet today are landmarks of the horror genre.

“The Wicker Man” — the 1973 original — was made for less than $1.5 million. At that price, this early folk horror film about a police officer who goes to an island to search for a missing girl would have needed to be the most mild of box office hits in order to manage some success. Although “The Wicker Man” did fairly decently upon release in its native England, the final worldwide tally didn’t break the $900,000 mark. It’s not hard to feel like Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) suffered for nothing. 

“The Wicker Man” didn’t recoup its production budget back then. Today, it is a cult classic horror movie and a foundational work of folk horror. The role of Lord Summerisle remained one of Sir Christopher Lee’s favorites until the day he died. A troubled sequel, “The Wicker Tree,” was released in 2011 and will need to be revisited in another twenty years to see how it has marinated. There was also a 2006 remake with Nicholas Cage. It is not discussed in polite company.

When determining whether the controversial animated drama “Watership Down” was truly successful or not, it depends on who it was successful for. As explained in the bonus features for the movie’s Blu-ray release, a high percentage of the film’s theatrical ticket sales were able to go back to the producers who financed the movie. That’s because nobody knew who the target market was. At the time, animated movies intended for adults were still the realm of underground films. Special deals had to be reached to get “Watership Down” to run in a handful of English theaters on its initial release. A literal handful. Five.

There’s also the matter of animation being expensive, especially in the days before computers pitched in to carry some of the burden. “Watership Down” and its tale of rabbits braving a dangerous world in search of a better life came with a budget of close to $5 million. Ultimately, the film did manage to be a box office success, granting a large return to the investors that believed in it. It even ranked as the sixth most profitable movie for the U.K. that year, but the oddity of its adult themes and the narrow ability to advertise for it kept it from greater heights — and made it one of the scariest flicks a kid could encounter on cable in the ’80s.

Though it remains a largely misunderstood animated movie today — with people unable to decide what it’s an allegory for, or if it’s an allegory at all — “Watership Down” is not only a cult classic, but a pioneer in mature animated film.

Before finding his groove with horror thrillers and crime epics, filmmaker Brian De Palma spent the first stretch of career as a purveyor of avant-garde, self-indulgent flops. Among the most notorious of these was “The Phantom of the Paradise,” a drug-fueled dark comedy musical that did so poorly at the U.S. box office that it only ran for a single week. Box Office Mojo claims it only grossed about $2,000 worldwide, which seems hard to believe. The point is, it was a flop.

Except in two specific cities. “The Phantom of the Paradise” ended up finding audiences in Paris, France and Winnipeg, Canada. It became such a phenomenon in the latter that there have since been multiple “Phantompalooza” festivals where fans celebrate the campiness, watch screenings, and even meet some of the original cast and crew. As for Paris, that’s where two teenagers named Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter bonded over their love of the movie — seeing it over 20 times — and carried much of the movie’s aesthetic into the musical group they eventually ended up forming. 

That group? Pioneering electronic music duo Daft Punk, who eventually got star “Phantom” Paul Williams to work them on a couple tracks for their Grammy-winning final album “Random Access Memories.” But even beyond the citizens of Winnipeg and the members of Daft Punk, “The Phantom of the Paradise” would eventually be widely reappraised as the scrappy masterpiece it always was — and is now considered one of the greatest rock and roll movies of all time. 

Post-“Jaws,” any movie that was expected to be a blockbuster-sized hit but failed to hit the appropriate box office tally was unfairly looked at as a flop. This proved doubly true for any movie that was unlucky enough to come out the same year as “Star Wars: A New Hope.” By most reasonable measures, “Pete’s Dragon,” the Disney live action/animation hybrid about a downtrodden orphan boy who befriends a friendly dragon, was a box office success. 

Disney didn’t see it that way. The company was hoping for a massive success, and didn’t consider the movie’s $36 million haul as good enough — especially compared to the massively successful new science fiction epic that was released earlier in the summer. Disney was also hoping that “Pete’s Dragon” would hit the lucrative teen market the way “Star Wars” had done, which turned out to be a lost cause.

It might not be mentioned in the same lists of the biggest Disney classics, but “Pete’s Dragon” is nonetheless beloved to those who grew up with it. It has earned an enduring legacy that led to an eventual remake in 2016. Regardless of any discussion about the remake itself, DVD sales of the original skyrocketed around the time it released, which hopefully made Disney less bitter about those whiffed profit margins, long ago. 

In the 1970s, Robert Altman was your favorite actor’s favorite director — even if he didn’t thrill theatre owners. Despite his legacy, Altman was never the mainstream big-hit guy. His highest grossing movie of all time was “M*A*S*H*” with $80 million worldwide, with the rest of his films dropping off sharply from there. Altman has more or less built his career out of movies that financially underperformed but won over the right audience in due time.

Altman had an especially pronounced example of this with his 1973 noir comedy “The Long Goodbye.” It was adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name though, as is Altman’s way, it represented a free-spirited approach to Chandler’s works — and in particular, his Philip Marlowe detective character, played by the lanky Elliot Gould — than was seen in previous adaptations like “The Big Sleep.” 

Reviews didn’t appreciate Altman’s satirical approach to Marlowe, an icon previously associated with Humphrey Bogart, and it certainly didn’t translate to theatrical success. “The Long Goodbye” earned so little at the box office that it probably didn’t recoup the budget for Gould’s suits. 

All but a few Altman movies need time for people to come around, and “The Long Goodbye” was no exception. It is now routinely ranked highly in lists of his best films, is the second highest rated of all Philip Marlowe movies on Rotten Tomatoes, and Paste Magazine even proclaimed Gould’s performance as the best of any other actor to play the role.

The movie that would become 1977’s adventure thriller “Sorcerer” was originally a modest $2 million production. As it often goes, however, the longer director William Friedkin sat with it, the bigger his ambitions grew. This was compounded by wanting to keep up with his peer, Francis Ford Coppola, who recently made the acclaimed hit “Apocalypse Now” on site in actual war-strewn jungles. What Friedkin didn’t note was how that shoot nearly drove everyone mad. The result was Friedkin percolating far grander plans for “Sorcerer,” leading to a spendy $22 million budget. 

At $2 million, “Sorcerer’s” $12 million total box office haul would’ve been a huge win. But when compared to the final budget, it barely covered groceries. The result was one of the most high profile flops of the entire decade, scorching Roy Scheider’s reputation, whose star was rising at the time thanks to “Jaws” two years prior. 

While it was initially seen as a disappointment, this gritty drama of desperate men on a dangerous job is now considered one of the best movies Friedkin ever made. That’s a statement that includes horror blockbuster “The Exorcist.” Friedkin himself said in 2017 that of all the movies he directed, “Sorcerer” is the only one he can still stand to watch.

“A Boy and His Dog” was always going to be a tough sell. Adapted from a cynically satirical story by author Harlan Ellison, it’s a movie about a misogynistic scavenger (Don Johnson) in a post apocalyptic 2024 — it was the distant future, then – who can telepathically communicate with his dog, Vic. Vic helps him find women to have non-consensual sex with. Even in the less progressive 1975, that was a problematic premise, and the film wasn’t helped by its brutal depictions of violence. It would take several re-releases for “A Boy and His Dog” to drag its way to a meager $6 million at the box office. At least production had been cheap, at $400,000.

Lest there be any question as to the lasting legacy of “A Boy and His Dog” beyond its controversial release and low haul, you need look no further than “Fallout.” The massively successful video game franchise that would go on to be adapted into an Emmy-winning TV series was heavily inspired by “A Boy and His Dog.” Both share irradiated mutants, makeshift towns created by and for survivors, and even star a canine companion. 

Beyond the “Fallout” franchise, “A Boy and His Dog” had also influenced the “Mad Max” film series. Ellison, despite criticizing the film’s additional misogyny, was pleased with the film and had no complaint about its legacy, and fans know he would have complained thoroughly and well. Ellison’s best novella hasn’t been adapted into a movie yet, but it could potentially be as inspirational as this one.

Unlike other movies on this list, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” didn’t need to wait until it came to home video in order to make its money back. Instead, the throwback musical horror comedy would become a legitimate box office success through sheer force of will, defiantly staying in theaters for literal decades despite initially being pulled from U.S. theaters after just a few weeks.

That wasn’t the end of this film’s box office story. Some theaters in Los Angeles didn’t pull the movie because it was consistently selling out screenings. When executives noticed that those screenings largely consisted of repeat customers, a 20th Century Fox marketing guy had the idea to turn the movie into a midnight movie event. They tested out the concept at a theater in New York City, already a destination for midnight screenings of quirky cult hit films. The initial group of 50 or so faithfuls that came back week after week slowly grew, and, to put some heels and lace on a well-worn phrase, the rest is queer history. 

During the course of its record-breaking run as the longest continuously running theatrical film of all time, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” became a legitimate box office smash. Actual totals are tough to pin down, given the nature of its screenings, but some estimates put the total tally at close to $500 million when adjusted for inflation. It even screened to an empty theatre for a week during the COVID lockdown, just to keep that streak going. Not bad for a two-week flop that only cost about $1 million to make.