Movies That Were Box Office Disasters, In Honor of ‘After Earth’

Movie #3 – Ishtar

Year – 1987

Ishtar was such a flop that it’s become shorthand for failure. The film cost $55 million to produce – a staggering sum for a comedy in 1987. So what happened?

Warren Beatty owed Elaine May a favor. In fact, he owed her two favors. Two really big favors. She had co-written Beatty’s 1978 directorial debut (not to mention mega-hit) Heaven Can Wait and done an uncredited rewrite on his follow-up directorial effort Reds. While May had directed films before she had never been given full creative control. Beatty wanted to provide her that opportunity by agreeing to star in one of her films. They were even able to get Dustin Hoffman to agree to co-star. (May had also done an uncredited rewrite on Tootsie. Are you sensing a theme here?)

Her idea was to recreate the “Road” pictures of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby; a clever enough idea (even if Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd had done it two years earlier in Spies Like Us.) However, while she could handle the comedy aspects of the film she had a more difficult time with the action scenes and location shooting in Morocco. The film ran massively over budget. So much so that it’s became a punchline in the press before it was even released.

The film did so poorly that it has never been released on DVD in North America. It does occasionally pop up on cable. The frustrating part is…it’s actually kind of funny. Beatty and Hoffman play songwriters who fancy themselves the next Simon & Garfunkel. But there songs (all written by Paul Williams) are delightfully awful. And each one is worse than the last. At one point they perform a song called “I’m Leaving Some Love in My Will” for couple celebrating their 50^th Wedding Anniversary.

Perhaps it benefits from diminished expectations but it’s actually not a half-bad movie. It bogs down in the second half but Beatty is funny playing a dimwit and Hoffman as his (slightly) smarter partner.