5 Huge 1970s Box Office Flops That Changed Hollywood Forever

The 1970s are now widely remembered as one of the richest periods in American movie history, a decade when many of the greatest ’70s films helped redefine what Hollywood could be. Directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Elaine May, Steven Spielberg, Alan J. Pakula, and a wave of other bold storytellers found their voices during this transformative era, pushing mainstream cinema into stranger, smarter, and more daring territory. For movie lovers, it was an extraordinary time: theaters could be showing “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “What’s Up, Doc?” and “The Sting” all within the same cultural moment.

Still, even a decade this celebrated had its share of box office disasters. While “The Godfather” and “Star Wars” were breaking records and reshaping the business, other expensive releases were collapsing in theaters and sending nervous signals through Hollywood. A handful of especially damaging 1970s box office bombs left marks that went far beyond a single disappointing opening weekend.

Some exposed how quickly audience tastes had changed. Others put studios under serious financial strain or derailed the momentum of filmmakers who had seemed unstoppable. In a decade often described as a creative high point for Hollywood, these five high-profile flops still managed to shake the industry and influence the kinds of movies studios were willing to make next.

The 1960s produced some of the most beloved musical movies ever made, and for a while Hollywood was convinced that lavish song-and-dance spectacles were close to a sure thing. Hits such as “Mary Poppins” and, above all, “The Sound of Music” proved that big musicals could become enormous moneymakers, especially through roadshow engagements that sold premium-priced tickets. Audiences embraced the best of them for their scale, pageantry, and old-fashioned entertainment value. But by the end of the decade, the formula was already showing cracks, with costly disappointments like “Doctor Dolittle” and “Paint Your Wagon” suggesting the public’s enthusiasm was fading.

By the early 1970s, the traditional Hollywood musical was beginning to look badly out of step. Moviegoers were gravitating toward darker, more confrontational films such as “The Exorcist” and “The Godfather,” leaving many old-school musical productions stranded in another era. There were exceptions, including “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Cabaret,” which found both audiences and acclaim. But most musicals struggled, and 1972’s “1776” became a prime example: a lumbering historical musical in which the Founding Fathers break into song on the road to signing the Declaration of Independence. Its stodgy approach makes “Hamilton” seem positively rebellious by comparison.

With a domestic gross of just $2.8 million against a $6 million budget, “1776” delivered an expensive lesson: the kind of musical that could thrive in 1965 was no longer a safe bet in 1972. After its failure, major live-action musicals became far less common for a time, with only select exceptions such as “Grease” or “The Wiz” keeping the genre visible in the years that followed.

In Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” “Sorcerer” editor Bud Smith describes watching the film’s trailer play before a screening of “Star Wars.” The sheer excitement and scale of George Lucas’ space adventure, he recalled, made William Friedkin’s grim thriller feel instantly out of sync with what audiences were suddenly craving. That was a brutal twist for Friedkin, who had recently dominated the early 1970s with “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” But Smith’s uneasy reaction proved prophetic: despite costing $22 million, “Sorcerer” earned only $9 million worldwide.

Over time, “Sorcerer” has come to symbolize a major shift away from the downbeat, challenging spirit of New Hollywood. The era when films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” could set the tone for mainstream American cinema was giving way to a new appetite for crowd-pleasing triumphs like “Star Wars,” “Rocky,” and “Jaws.” Studios including Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, which helped finance Friedkin’s film, were becoming far less willing to gamble huge sums on bleak, uncompromising projects in the mold of “Sorcerer.”

The tragedy of these adverse long-term ripple effects is that today, “Sorcerer” is rightfully considered a masterpiece. Film industry titans like Quentin Tarantino have called it one of the best movies ever made. Alas, all that artistry couldn’t prevent studios from seeing “Sorcerer” as a blueprint for what not to make and Friedkin’s career from tumbling after its failure. Bud Smith saw all of this unfolding during the “coming attractions” at that fateful “Star Wars” showing.

Few had it as good as director Peter Bogdanovich in the first half of the 1970s. His second directorial effort, “The Last Picture Show,” was an acclaimed, critically lauded box office hit. He followed that up with two more well-reviewed crowd-pleasers, “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon.” Unfortunately, Bogdanovich’s hot streak came to a grinding halt in the mid-’70s when he helmed the 1975 Burt Reynolds/Cybill Shepherd musical “At Long Last Love,” which only grossed $1.5 million on a $5.1 million budget. Though today it has its defenders, “At Long Last Love” was simply just an infamous bomb at the time of its release.

In the wake of this failure, Bogdanovich officially struggled to get further financing or major gigs in Hollywood. More pressingly, “At Long Last Love” opened three months before “Jaws” turned the entire film industry upside down. Seeing “Jaws”  in 1975 was a transformative experience signaling that cutesy romantic throwbacks like “At Long Last Love” had even less of a place in a 1970s cinema scene already prioritizing “The French Connection” over titles evoking “Top Hat.” Beyond falling victim to Hollywood’s newfound love for tentpoles, “At Long Last Love” has also been seen as a major setback moment for Shepherd.

“At Long Last Love” was crafted as a glitzy love letter to Hollywood’s earliest years. Instead, it was a box office dud that capsized Peter Bogdanovich’s career and guaranteed Hollywood studios wouldn’t be making more movies like this in the near future.

Normally, remakes and their ilk are considered guaranteed moneymakers for Hollywood. That was certainly not the case with “Lost Horizon,” a 1973 update of a 1937 feature of the same name. Though not quite regarded as one of the worst movie remakes of all time in terms of artistry, “Lost Horizon” was still a shocking flop. The feature, which offered plenty of star power in folks like Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann, topped out at only $3.8 million at the box office. Considering its $5.9 million costs,  it was a disaster, pure and simple.

The effects of this film’s demise were enormous. For one thing, it marked one of the last hurrahs for major American studios initially releasing musicals through costly roadshow releases. This style of distribution had long been on the wane, but between 1972’s “The Godfather” establishing a precedent for movies dropping in hundreds of theaters right away and the roadshow musical becoming associated with flops like “Lost Horizon,” the roadshow release strategy was dead in the water.

Meanwhile, the film’s immense losses contributed to a dreadful 1973 for Columbia Pictures, which had to weather immense negative press and reorient itself after “Lost Horizon” tanked. Any hopes that this remake could provide easy cash for Columbia proved a nonsensical dream. Instead, this was another ’70s musical flop that struck tremendous sour notes for all involved.

There’s so much greatness packed into Martin Scorsese’s filmography that everyone needs to watch even some of his box office bombs at least once. But although he’s a cinematic genius, sometimes his films just don’t connect with the general public. If a 2011 adaptation of a popular children’s book like “Hugo” struggled to break even, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that Scorsese’s foray into late 70s musical cinema was also a financial non-starter. For 1977’s “New York, New York,” Scorsese tried going Vincente Minnelli or Jacques Demy with a romantic musical starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli.

Unfortunately, the film was as bleak as any other Scorsese movie, which made for an odd match (to say the least) for general audiences. Musical fans wanted something bouncier (even the downbeat “Sweet Charity” had Sammy Davis Jr. belting out a bubbly tune), while “Taxi Driver” die-hards weren’t falling over themselves for this kind of film. Inevitably, “New York, New York” only grossed $14 million, a disappointing haul given its $16 million budget. Not only did “New York” kick off a darker era for Scorsese, but it also cost financier United Artists nearly $10 million.

In hindsight, the movie ominously predicted things to come for United Artists. “New York, New York” was a grim spot in an otherwise lucrative year for the studio, which championed offbeat and artistic works. Three years later, United Artists was sold to MGM.