25 Great Movies That Flopped
8. Brazil (1985)
This completely off-kilter and exceptionally smart exploration of our society through a fictional dystopian, totalitarian one will never be matched.
“Brazil” has been released in a definitive DVD/Blu-ray collection by The Criterion Collection. Most notably, the release features two different cuts of the movie.
The first is Gilliam’s director’s cut, and the second is a shorter version with a happier ending that was created after Gilliam took his name off the film and was locked out of the editing room by Universal executives.
The movie is loosely based on George Orwell’s novel “1984”, and many critics have drawn parallels between the two stories.
Gilliam fought an almighty battle with studio executives in order to get his final cut released and arranged a secret screening of the film at the University of Southern California.
The University had originally asked the director to give a lecture to its media students, but Gilliam instead screened his entire movie despite multiple phone calls from studio executives demanding him not to. After two weeks of private screenings, an LA film critic saw the film and named it as the “The Best Picture of the Year.”
