The movie business is strange, when you think about it. Before streaming changed everything, movies – the culmination of countless artists pouring metric tons of time, ♊energy, and yes, love – often only got a window of two to three weekends at most to earn all the money it could, if that. It’s a business m♑odel inherited from live theater, and many stone-cold classics actually bombed at the box office before finding a longer shelf life on home video and the internet.

Here are 32 classic movies that did poorly in terms of commercial revenue before ear🌠ning a proper 𒁃place in the hearts and minds of audiences everywhere.

32. Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Seven years after his Mad Max Fury Road set a new standard for action cinema, director George Miller strove to tell ღan epic romance b🍃etween a lonesome British scholar (played by Tilda Swinton) and a handsome genie (Idris Elba). Even at a modest budget of $60 million, Three Thousand Years of Longing struggled in a theatrical market still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Its rare existence as a hypnotic adult fantasy makes it a modern classic destined to eventually find its audience.

, Glazer remarked: “I remember seeing her walking along the street in a pink jumper on a long lens and she looks like an exot💎ic insect on the wrong continent.”

and such sentiments have 🍌only . The movie has since been hailed as among del Toro’s best, even 🐠if it’s also one of his biggest commercial flops.

29. Tenet (2020)

Christopher Nolan is one of the few true auteurs of the 21st century, with 🔯anything he makes drawing audiences comparable to a franchise sequel. But the COVID-19 pandemic truly tested his status. Budgeted at $200 million and boasting a complex narrative involving time manipulation, Nolan’s sci-fi action film Tenet opened in theaters when staying home was the safest option for most. Eve𒊎n with a total gross of $365 million, Tenet lost money for Warner Bros. But it has found a dedicated following, with the spoken line “Don’t try to understand it, feel it” serving as a rallying cry for its admirers.

29. Ishtar (1987)

Elaine May’s riotous comedy about two numbskull songwriters (played by Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty) caught in a geo-political standoff began with very positive test screenings. But bad blood between producers at the highest level was leveraged in the press, leading to negative reviews and inflated marketing costs to outdo bad publicity. Ishtar was not just nuclear-levels of a bomb, but a consequential one that led to Columbia selling off to Sony. After decades of being considered among the worst movies✨ ever, Ishtar has enjoyed reappraisal as a brilliant satire of male narcissism. Its biggest fans include cinematic titans Q𒀰uentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.

28. The Last Duel (2021)

Ridley Scott is no stranger to great movies losing at the box off𓆉ice; in 2005, his war epic Kingdom of Heaven was sentenced to the guillotine. But in 2021, his medieval drama The Last Duel suffered from a combination of troubling subject matter and theaters still rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic. (Though Scott blamed millennials and cell phones, for some reason.) Still, Scott’s refined craftsmanship and a prominent cast of Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, and Ben Affleck make The Last Duel sublime, and a reminder that grown ups can still have movies to themselves. 

27. Donnie Darko (2001)

Director Richard Kelly burst onto Hollywood with his debut film Donnie Darko, a psychological horror-thriller teeming with teenage angst. An overwhelmingly bleak tone and a pivotal plot point involving a plane crash made its release in October 2001 very awkward, and are the roo⛎t causes for a poor box office. But Donnie Darko found a rabid audience on DVD and from internet word of mouth. It kicked off Jake Gyllenhaal’s journey to stardom and made Gary Jules’ somber cover of “Mad World” the anthem for nihilistic 21st century youth.

26. Children of Men (2006)

A haunting dystopian thriller where Clive Owen plays a civil servant aiding a pregnant refugee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men imagined a plausible future battered by xenophobia and ecocide. Despite its genius and well-deserved accolades, it failed to sell enough tickets. Children of Men grossed only $70.5 million against a then-hefty $76 million production budget, but a recurring place on various best-ofꦗ lists ensure the movie will continue to alarm audiences about our self-destructive apocalypse until it’s too late. 

25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel/memoir tanked in theaters but lives on as a poster hung in college dorm rooms everywhere. Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro co-sta🔴r as a journalist and attorney respectively🦩 who make a mess of Las Vegas while high on, well, everything. Gilliam memorably frames the American dream through a funhouse mirror, where capitalist aspirations look grotesque under the hot neon lights of self-determination. 

24. Showgirls (1995)

Another look into the perversion of the American dream, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls – starring sitcom queen Elizabeth Berkley stripping away her wholesome image – has long maintained its reputation as a prodigious failure. It also endured quite the takedown from critics, who were uncertain how to regist𝄹er its abundant sexuality and surface-level misogyny. But time has been kind to Showgirls, with modern critics and filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Adam McKay recognizing it as a cunning satire that takes camp seriously. In a 2015 interview, Verhoe𒊎ven lamented how much Berkely shouldered the movie’s overwhelming negativity. 

23. John Carter (2012)

In the same year The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises caught the world in a vice grip, Andrew Stanton’s big budget sci-fi John Carter (based on the 100-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs novel) flopped big time and failed to give Disney a new franchise. But amidst years of same-old superhero movꦫies, critics and audiences have reevaluated John Carter as an overlooked classic that actually deserved a franchise and was cursed by timing. Both its lead stars, Taylor Kitsch and Lily Collins, have since remarked how John Carter is the movie they’re still recognized from. “I will die, and 🌞people will still be seeing this movie,” Collins said in 2022.