5 Classic Movies Made by People Who Wanted Them to Fail

But with the film's production already set in stone, they couldn't just shelve it. What they could do, however, was get rid of Clooney, whose personal contract said he could take off and still get paid in full. These fucking Hollywood guys, right? They bail if somebody gets their mocha wrong. So, the studio tried to gently persuade Clooney to pack his bags and leave by implying that if he didn't, angry terrorists would come to his house and murder his balls off. That's a pretty solid argument!

One that didn't convince Clooney in the slightest.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Clooney shrugged off the terrorist threats, which we remind you were actually delivered by proxy from his own studio, and finished the movie. It went on to make $150 million at the box office (today's money), score a 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, get named "some kind of weird masterpiece" by Roger Ebert, and as best we can tell, everybody's balls went perfectly unmurdered.

When Psycho came out in 1960, it changed everything. Not only was the movie unusually dark and violent for its time -- it dove right into the disturbed mind of a psychopathic killer living with the ghost of his murdered mother -- it also showed an unmarried couple sharing a bed (hey, that was more shocking than an Eli Roth movie to a 1960s audience). So it's no wonder that when Hitchcock first presented Paramount Pictures with the idea for the movie, they thought he had lost his goddamn mind.

Universal Studios

Unfortunately for the studio, they were contractually obligated to let Hitchcock make a movie -- ANY movie -- for them (that we didn't get Alfred Hitchcock's Paramount Executives vs. The Rape Spiders is a testament to the man's restraint). But since the contract didn't say anything about studio heads not being unscrubbable ball sacks about it, they went ahead and did just that: They let Hitchcock film Psycho, but took absolutely every opportunity to screw with him while doing it.

Paramount Pictures

The first step on Paramount's bone list was giving Hitchcock a hilariously small budget, meaning no Technicolor at a time when a director could reasonably expect it and actors whose pay grades would need to triple for them to qualify as slaves. But that didn't stop Hitchcock for even a second: He simply shot the movie in black and white and used the crew from his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Things still looked grim, though, so Hitchcock ultimately agreed to shoot the movie for free, only taking a cut of the back end if the studio gave him enough cash to finish it, and then distributed it.

Paramount Pictures

Moved by his artistic selflessness, Paramount's heart grew three sizes that day. Unfortunately, that still left it cold and microscopic -- they promptly kicked the director off their lot, telling him to go film his turd over at their rival's place, Universal Studios. They wouldn't even let him use their sets or equipment. Obviously, none of this deterred Hitchcock, who went on to film one of the most profitable films ever, and arguably the most famous suspense horror in history. It may have broken his mind, though, seeing as how he started stapling birds to Tippi Hedren not long after.

So when EMI acquired the rights to The Wicker Man, they didn't exactly have high hopes for it. Then again, EMI's initial lack of faith quickly turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy once they blocked the movie's director from accessing the final cut of the film and removed 15 minutes of footage from it, including key plot elements. When Christopher Lee saw the final product and demanded to know what in Saruman's glorious beard they did to his movie, the studio head told him that The Wicker Man was "one of the 10 worst films I've ever seen."

EMI Films

Lee decided to prove him wrong and had his film critic buddies attend a screening of the movie. Even in its mangled form, the critics loved it. Suddenly, the movie that no one wanted was the hottest thing around and the studio was finally convinced to give the unbutchered version a proper release. There was a slight problem with that, though: The original cut of the movie was sent to another studio, where it was literally buried. The consensus says that the film cans with the director's cut were at some point loaded into a garbage truck and buried under the M3 somewhere in the southern U.K. Apparently it was standard practice for British filmmakers to treat potentially poor-quality movies like mummy's curses, lest they return from their entombment to bore the masses for all eternity.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Luckily, in 1979 an existing copy of the director's cut was discovered and finally saw a wide and hugely successful release, after which The Wicker Man came to be known as "the Citizen Kane of horror movies." And then somebody slapped Nic Cage in the remake, wired him up on gas station counter amphetamines, told him that every single cast member peed in his coffee, and filmed the results. And that's how most people know the movie today. Guard your legacy, kids -- there are villains about.

It's the sort of slow-moving tale about the human condition that gives film critics week-long erections and ends in a shameful bukkake of self-congratulatory Hollywood awards. In Marty's case, the film won four Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and even became the second American movie to score one of those fancy European Super Oscars, the Palme d'Or, at the Cannes Film Festival. Not too bad for a movie specifically designed by the studio to crash and burn at the box office.

United Artists

In 1954, actor Burt "I was the old guy from Field of Dreams" Lancaster and producer Harold Hecht faced a "problem" in every sense that the quotation marks imply: Their movies were too successful and made their studio too much money, which would actually end up costing them a bundle after taxes. So the studio came up with the idea to produce a movie so bad that it would become an instant flop and allow the studio to write it off on April 15, earning them a nifty net profit. As you may have guessed, Marty was meant to be that flop.

The studio started by digging up a script from an episode of a third-rate TV show on NBC and had the original writer turn it into a full-length movie on the fly. They followed it by casting, as Lancaster put it, "two ugly people" in the main roles of this romantic dramedy, one of whom was mostly known for playing tough guys. They were so sure it would fail that the studio even had an accountant dutifully add up the costs of the production as they went and actually closed the set once he calculated that they'd lost enough money for the day. However, it turned out that the movie still had to be completed and released for the tax write-off to work, which was when the unthinkable happened: Marty became a hit.

United Artists

Shockingly, those two "ugly people" that Lancaster was talking about turned out to be more relatable than the beautiful plastic-faced actors that comprise 99 percent of Hollywood. The idea that true love is for everyone, regardless of outer beauty, struck a chord with audiences for some bizarre reason and created a massive pop culture phenomenon. All from a film that literally started out as the plot of The Producers.

Terry Gilliam initially handed over a 142-minute film; the studio insisted that it be 135 minutes, tops, and also have a happy ending where butterflies fly out of a unicorn's mouth and distribute free candy to all the world's children. Then, the studio delayed the movie's premiere so many times that Gilliam paid for the following full-page ad in Variety:

Variety

Gilliam made a private disagreement into a public feud, and he did it in a way that made him look like a martyr and the studio guys like typical Hollywood buttholes (which, OK, they were, but that's beside the point!). Luckily, the execs decided to act like adults, by which we mean they threw a fit, basically holding their breath until Gilliam went away: Universal immediately put out an embargo, preventing any theater in the country from showing Brazil, which had already been released abroad. They of course refused to distribute it themselves, and they wouldn't even let any theater show Gilliam's own personal prints. Publicly, studio boss Sid Sheinberg justified this by saying that the film was doing miserably overseas and would probably do as bad here at home, but when the LA Times checked that story, it turned out to be a lie. In the end, fed up with the bullshit, Gilliam started holding private, completely illegal screenings of his film, where it was seen by a few film critics. And so, when Hollywood handed out its Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards that year, the award for Best Screenplay went to ... Brazil.

Best Picture went to ... Brazil.

Best Director went to ... Terry Gilliam ... for Brazil.

Global_Pics/iStock/Getty Images

They say that, to this day, if you look up at the stars above Hollywood, you can still see Gilliam's giant raised middle fingers there, sparkling in the sky for all eternity.

Soon Van writes and builds websites. Evan V. Symon is a moderator in the Cracked Workshop. When he isn't watching movies to see which ones sync up with David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust album, he can be found on Facebook, and be sure to bookshelf and vote for his new book, The End of the Line. Dustin Koski also wrote Six Dances to End the World, which he would oddly prefer to be a successful book. Ryan Menezes is a writer and layout editor here at Cracked. He broke down and made a Twitter page just for his Cracked fans.

Related Reading: For a list of movies that got way more praise than they deserved, click here. Adam Brown will explain why Zero Dark Thirty is way overhyped. For a list of awful movies that had astounding highlights, you'll want to click this link. Ready to learn about movies that kicked off iconic fashion trends? This is the link for you.

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