Monster ticket sales do not always equal cinematic immortality. In fact, some of the most famous films in history did not perform well at the box office, at least initially. The Rocky Horror Picture Show only started playing at midnights because the movie bombed in a more typical release, and a few other quirky films around that time started to find success with night owls and Rocky Horror’s distributor figured they’d had nothing to lose by trying that too. The Shawshank Redemption was the 51st-highest grossing film of 1994 — it made less money in theaters than Pauly Shore’s In the Army Now! — but over time, it grew into one of the most beloved films of the entire decade.
On the flip side, not every theatrical hit remains popular forever. In just the last three decades, there are an astonishing number of forgotten movies whose box-office totals alone qualify them as “blockbusters.” Just because lots of people bought tickets doesn’t mean they liked what they saw, though, or remembered what they saw months or years later.
Today we’re taking a look at precisely that sort of movie, the blockbusters that did not transition into generational favorites. These ain’t The Godfathers of the world. They may not even be The Godfather Part IIIs of the world. These are the movies that hit it big and then faded away. And just for fun, we’ve listed them in reverse order of financial success, so the further you go down the list, the larger the box-office totals become. Some of them are genuinely shocking. Who knew the Jesse Eisenberg talking bird movie was a half-a-billion-dollar mega-hit?!? I certainly didn’t.
25 Big Blockbusters You Forgot Existed
These movies all made more than $150 million worldwide — some several multiples of $150 million worldwide.
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Overlooked ’90s Movies That Should Have Been Bigger
These movies should have ’90s classics. Maybe they still can be.