The film business is a real hit-or-miss industry. That’s just a given. Every now and then comes an idea for a film that just sounds too surreal to be a success. The story may be unconventional, the intended execution may be too expensive, production orreleases might be delayedor theteam behind the projectmay simply be in too over their heads. While these types of movies have all the makings of a flop, they wind up being a hit every now and then.
Some movies only look bad on paper but they narrowly avoid failing at the box office or with critics. It isn’t an easy feat to accomplish but some directors have done it. It’s hard enough making a successful film but making one with outlandish premises ormuddled productionsis quite the accomplishment. Despite different setbacks or just over the top creative descisions, the following movies managed to overcome these problems and were much more well received than expected. The film industry is full of suprises and these five films are just a few of them. These are five films that shouldn’t have worked but did.
5Romeo + Juliet
Baz Luhrmann’s stylized visions of classic stories would become well known. But his reimagining of the classic Shakespeare play was pretty hard to accept at face value.Romeo + Julietis a fairly simple story to modernize but Lurhman’s opted to go a step further and kept the language of the original play in the story. While Leonard DiCaprio wound up using a gun instead of a sword, he still spoke the words as originally written by Shakespeare. There is no way that should’ve worked, and yet Lurhmann was able to perfectly craft a Shakespearean movie for the MTV generation. The film could have easily been a cheesefest of epic proportions yet it turned out to be a highly entertaining movie.
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Venomis a classic Spider-Man villain so it was worrying when it was revealed that he would be receiving his own moviewithout the webslinger himself. While the casting of Tom Hardy as Venom was a good sign, the story didn’t exactly fair well with fans. In fact, Venom looked like a basic comic book movie ripped out of 2005. This version had a significantly different origin than his comic-book counterpart. Moreover, the films itself was pretty silly, almost to an intentional degree. Hardy spends a large time of the film being verbally abused by the alien symbiote and it worked suprisingly well. Venom was never known as a comedic character, and probably never will, but this film actually made it work. Eddie Brock and his symbiote may have been turned into losers for the movie but they were lovable losers.
Face/Offsounds like a B-movie on paper. It’s the story of an FBI agent who switches faces with a terrorist to go undercover and find out where he planted a bomb. It also stars Nicolas Cage which adds more credence to it being a B-movie. Yet, it wasn’t that at all. Director John Woo took an outlandish storyline and produced one of the greatest action movies of all time. Never mind the fact that the film begins with a child being sniped by Nicolas Cage or that it’s never explained how the FBI has such sophisticated technology to perform a face transplant to begin with. This classic remains a legendary action movie.
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George Miller was already facing an uphill battle when he decided to makeMad Max: Fury Road. It was the fourth entry inhis iconic series. There aren’t too many fourth films in a series that are well received but he really went for it decades after the previous Max Max film, Beyond Thunderdome. Adding to that obstacle was the absense of Mad Max himself, Mel Gibson. How on Earth could there be aMad Maxfilm without the actor who brought him to life? It was a lot to ask of audiences to accept Tom Hardy as the new Max Rockatansky.
These were all the issuesMad Mad: Fury Roadfaced before production even began. Once filming began, Miller had to contend with even more pressing issues. Issues between Charlize Theron and Hardywere well publiczed. The two faced a myriad of issues while filming in the brutal desert conditions. Once filming was completed, the finished production wouldn’t even see the light of day for nearly two years. Any film with that long of a delay is typically destined to bomb. Despite so many setbacks, Mad Max: Fury Road ended up being the most successful film out of the entire series both criticall and commercially. It received 10 Academy Award nominations includuing ones for Best Picture and Best Director.
The creative team behindCreedwas impressive. Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan had already found success with their critically acclaimed film,Fruitvale Station. There was no doubt that Creed was in the right hands. What made this film so suprising and what could be seen as a hindreance, was the fact that Creed was aiming to be a dramatic continuation of a character who was last seen being punched to death by Ivan Drago after parading around in star spangled regalia. As tragic as the death of Apollo Creed was, it was also pretty ridiculous. His death came in one of the more campier entries of the Rocky Balboa series. Despite this, Coogler managed to create a layered spinoff that could have easily been derailed. Creed became a smashing success, even earning an Academy Award nomination for Sylvester Stallone. More than that, it revived the Rocky series and established a brand new and fitting spinoff series led by Jordan.
