There’s a quiet irony in how the film industry defines failure. A movie spends years in development, burns through a studio’s budget, lands in thousands of theaters, and then disappears in two weekends. The trades write the obituary. The executives move on. The movie gets filed away as a cautionary tale.
Except sometimes it doesn’t stay there. One of the most unusual things to happen in the modern era of film is the idea that something can flop in theaters but prove genuinely successful on streaming. Before the 21st century, this might have happened to movies that picked up bigger audiences through TV airings, but in the 2020s, streaming is where second winds for box office flops are made possible. These six films are proof of exactly that.
The Suicide Squad (2021)
Things became complicated when Warner Bros. released all of their movies on streaming simultaneously with their theatrical release, which is one of the major reasons that despite being beloved by critics and audiences alike, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad only made $168.7 million at the box office. For a film of its scale, that ranked among the lowest-grossing comic book movies in recent memory. This was one of many casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the mass closures of movie theaters across the globe left many good stories unseen, while The Suicide Squad’s simultaneous release on HBO Max further contributed to poor box office numbers.
The streaming story, though, ended very differently. The film eventually found its place with fans of its eclectic cast of characters and became HBO Max’s most-watched DC film, with the actual viewership likely even higher once piracy figures are considered. Positive word of mouth carried the film to more success on HBO Max, with it reportedly being watched in nearly 5 million households in its first three weeks of release. It’s a textbook case of the right film landing at the wrong moment.
Babylon (2022)
Babylon was met with a polarized response from critics upon release and was a box-office bomb, grossing $65 million against a production budget of $78 to $80 million, ultimately losing Paramount $87 million. Director Damien Chazelle, fresh off the success of La La Land, assembled an extraordinary cast including Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva for this sprawling Hollywood epic. The film debuted to just $3.6 million over its opening weekend, and with a combined production and marketing budget of roughly $160 million, it needed to gross around $250 million to break even.
One of the most polarizing films of 2022 is now a sleeper hit on streaming. Babylon currently holds the number three spot among top-streaming movies on Paramount+, and despite its underwhelming reception during release, the film is now finding its audience. It received five nominations at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture in the Musical or Comedy category, and won Best Original Score, alongside nominations at the BAFTAs and Academy Awards. Awards recognition that the box office never reflected is finally reaching the people who missed it the first time.
Madame Web (2024)
Upon its release in 2024, Madame Web became one of recent memory’s most infamous and openly mocked films. Based on minor characters from the Spider-Man comics, it starred Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic who begins experiencing visions of the future, leading her to team up with three teenage girls. Widely blasted by critics, Madame Web only managed to make just over $100 million at the box office on a budget around the same amount, plus a reported marketing cost of around $60 million. The math didn’t work out, to put it mildly.
What happened next, though, caught the industry off guard. Madame Web debuted on Netflix a few short months after flopping in theaters, and it debuted in second place with nearly 11 million views accumulated during its first week. Sony took notice. Box office flops like Madame Web found real success once they began streaming on Netflix, and it became Sony’s most-streamed 2024 movie on the platform, even overshadowing hits like It Ends With Us and Anyone But You. Whether audiences watched it out of curiosity or genuine enjoyment, the numbers were hard to argue with.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World received positive reviews from critics who noted its visual style and humor, though it was a box-office failure, grossing $48 million against a budget of $60 to $85 million. Edgar Wright’s genre-bending action comedy, based on the beloved graphic novel series, simply couldn’t find mainstream traction in theaters. Universal’s marketing team faced significant blame for the lackluster performance, with the studio openly acknowledging the challenge of broadening the film to a mainstream audience, noting that it was primarily targeted at a specific demographic of males between the ages of 20 and 40.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World became the cult film of the 2010s in the specific way that only a few films manage: people didn’t just like it, they claimed it. The visual language, the video game grammar, the specific cultural references. The film’s main cast reprised their roles in the 2023 animated television series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off on Netflix, with Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall also serving as executive producers. Universal even announced a theatrical re-release after discovering its streaming numbers had been growing quietly for over a decade. The film they wrote off is still accumulating audience fifteen years later.
The Last Duel (2021)
Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel was not only one of the best movies of the year it came out, but also one of the best in Scott’s entire filmography. It is an incredibly acted drama that stays with the audience long after it is over. Watching it belly-flop at the box office, with only $30 million worldwide, was genuinely disheartening. The film featured Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, and Ben Affleck in a medieval epic that told its central story from three separate perspectives. It was always going to be a tough sell, running close to two and a half hours with a medieval setting, effectively telling one story of a horrific crime from three different viewpoints with small but notable changes each time.
The Last Duel was a box office disappointment that found genuine redemption on streaming platforms, proving that the audience for this film exists even if it arrived late. The story of a woman’s pursuit of justice in 14th-century France resonated deeply with viewers on streaming in ways that the theater release couldn’t quite capture. Many movies fail to make a profit in the theatrical window, but some are fortunate enough to find their audience once available on VOD and streaming, where good word of mouth can spread and give a well-deserving film its due recognition.
The Snowman (2017)
Despite being based on a best-selling novel, and having acclaimed director Tomas Alfredson behind the camera, The Snowman was panned upon release and failed to gross even $7 million in its domestic box office. Michael Fassbender starred as Norwegian detective Harry Hole in what was supposed to be the launch of a prestige crime franchise. The film’s critical reception was so poor it currently holds a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which goes some way toward explaining why it only made around $7 million at the domestic box office.
Six years after its release in theaters, The Snowman found an audience on Netflix in April 2023, when it climbed to the number one spot on the platform’s most-watched list. There has been very little reappraisal of the film, and it is still widely seen as a shocking disappointment, yet it still managed to find massive success on Netflix. Why it did so remains something of a mystery, though there’s a real chance audiences flocked to it precisely to see if it was as bad as everyone had said. Morbid curiosity, it turns out, is its own form of viewership.
What these six films share isn’t necessarily quality or even a second wave of critical appreciation. It’s timing, accessibility, and the simple fact that streaming removes the friction of a theater ticket. The streaming model has upended everything we thought we knew about what qualified as a successful movie. Now that streaming is dominant, if a movie bombs during its initial release, there’s always a chance it might find an audience when it becomes available on a platform. The box office may write the first draft of a film’s legacy, but it rarely gets to write the last one.
