Box Office Poison

Image credit: Amazon

After quite a long stint of fantasy, history, and cats it was certainly time to take a break from fiction and dive into reading about my other great love from the human experience: films. I’ve had a love of movies from a very young age, particularly talking about the reasons why I like certain movies, what makes them so good (or sometimes bad). So, when Partner gifted me Box Office Poison by journalist Tim Robey, you better believe I was excited to read it.

Beginning with Intolerance (1916) and finishing up with Cats (2019), Box Office Poison, a term that was once used to describe actress Katherine Hepburn, chronicles the delicious dramas and disasters of a carefully chosen lineup of cinematic flops.

From billowing budgets that bankrupted studios, to the increasing social need for censorship, to creative conflicts, and misread interpretations of source material, the book is more than a mere collection of reviews about films that bombed. It simultaneously is an exploration into the Hollywood evolution story, the changing times, and how cultural, social, and technological attitudes and aptitudes influence the industry. Robey explores a whole range of potholes and roadblocks that caused films to underperform at the box office, as well as outrage social groups, destroy careers, demolish empires, and sink into obscurity. Each film’s entry focuses on a different villain: budget balloons, social intolerance regarding sexual identities, scheming moneymen, and more besides, and what makes the book particularly interesting is the fact that a compelling evolution narrative takes shape in the background, telling a story despite the unconventional, compilation format of the book.

Image credit: Amazon

Robey writes professionally as well as with an attitude and a deep love and appreciation of cinema, providing a reading experience that feels a bit like a lecture of a favourite subject in university. Both facts and opinions are delivered with the same passionate tone that enlightens and excites the reader as well as very subtly draws their attention to the evolution narrative taking place in the background.

Box Office Poison is both a fascinating and fun collection of film reviews that gives insight into a huge industry as well as chronicling an intriguing tale about its evolution over the last century. While it’s insightful and entertaining, it’s also provocative and piques a desire to track down the films that it examines and give them a watch (a few of them anyway).

Author: Tim Robey, 2024

Published: Faber & Faber Limited, London, 2024