Wa the movie a flop? - Hello, Dolly! (1969) Discussion

[–] mikwalen 16 years ago

It is true, it did not make back its cost for quite awhile. Over the years, it has done so - including sales of home video (it is in fact one of Fox's best-selling home videos).

Many people did go to see it, but it simply didn't reach the $$$ figures it needed to be a smash success.

"Cut the ballet. It stinks anyway"

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[–] claudia02127 16 years ago

I always thought that it had done well...

I think it's a great film.
This is a logic free zone:
Use of logic will be met with uncomfortable silences

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[–] mikwalen 16 years ago

It's a beautiful film. I don't care what any critic says!!

"Cut the ballet. It stinks anyway"

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[–] Washingtonnative (2613) 5 years ago

Agreed!

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[–] budikavlan 16 years ago

Compare to the box office of other contemporary films, it did fine, but as was said, the production was so expensive, it didn't make back its budget for quite some time. The same is true of many movies widely considered unsuccessful, such as Cleopatra and Waterworld.

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[–] onepotato2 16 years ago

Nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox along with Cleopatra. It was a dud.

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[–] krazyj2472002 15 years ago

Yes - it was a huge flop. Streisand was totally wrong for the part - way too young for the role. No one is arguing about her voice. She was just miscast.

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[–] SeisCinemaSeis 15 years ago

On the trivia section it says that Hello, Dolly! was "The fifth-highest grossing film of 1969", and still lost money because its massive $25 million budget (massive for its time) couldn't be recovered.

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[–] mikwalen 15 years ago

It didn't really bomb ... it just took quite awhile to get its money back. People did go to see it.

DOLLY is one of the highest selling home video releases of all time, from 1977 (it was one of the very first movies ever released to home video) to the present dvd.

"Samantha! You picked a lemon in the garden of love!"

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[–] markedjuan 15 years ago

As the previous posters pointed out, Hello, Dolly! was the fifth highest grossing movie of 1969. It grossed $38 million which was equivalent to $15 million in rentals. Nowadays, they don't measure a film's earnings in rentals anymore. If they still did, then a lot of today's movies would be considered flops.

Also, the grosses of Hello, Dolly! during the first two weeks of its run were actually higher than those of The Sound of Music. This was proudly trumpeted by Fox in its trade ads. Dolly just didn't have the legs to make it as successful as The Sound of Music. At that time anyway, what movie could equal its success?

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[–] mikwalen 15 years ago

Thanks for that!!!...that's interesting!

"Samantha! You picked a lemon in the garden of love!"

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[–] bitherwack 15 years ago

I think the production costs,
as well as audience interest,
and amount of running time
could all have been saved by only
doing one verse of each song.
I know this is going to rile the
fans, but there really isn't any
additional benefit from hearing all
5 verses of anything.

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[–] DryToast 15 years ago

So we have an hour of music led by the most popular singer of her time, and an hour and a half of strained, unfunny comedy performed on absurdly elaborate, expensive sets, and your solution is to cut down the music?

Then we have an overproduced, minimally amusing comedy with occasional abbreviated musical numbers like little 90-second hiccups.

"Please! You're not at home!"

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[–] mikwalen 15 years ago

I actually read (somewhere) that there was indeed a shortened version of DOLLY - two hours maybe?

I love it, so I'd never want to see a second of it cut, but I wonder what the trimmed version looked like?

"Samantha! You picked a lemon in the garden of love!"

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[–] rrb_1 9 years ago

A musical with a story as limp as Dolly’s needs the immediacy and magic of live performance. Its fluff book lacks the substance of, say, Cabaret’s, where the stage show could be re-imagined and deepened for the screen.

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[–] movieghoul 9 years ago

Yes, the problem with Dolly on screen is that the story is just too trivial to involve the audience. On stage, it's always been magical. Interesting that Funny Girl, which is not nearly as good a musical on stage, worked better on screen. The bio story was involving, and the musical numbers were mostly Streisand singing alone on screen, without the overblown production numbers.

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[–] ecarle 9 years ago

I think I have read that Hello Dolly was the Fifth Highest Grossing film of 1969, which is very good...but indeed, it cost too much to go into profit for a long, long time.

Roughly the same thing happened that year with Paint Your Wagon. Lots of people saw these movies, but they didn't make big money. For one thing, they ran in "limited roadshow engagements" for a long time which meant they weren't in many theaters.

It was a different era for release patterns. "Big bucks" weren't really the goal. Making the movie "big" and making a few bucks was.

Critics were harsh on the "mastodon musicals" of the late sixties(which were the downside to the Big Hit Sound of Music), but I think Hello, Dolly and Paint Your Wagon are great fun. The money is up on the screen and the stars are major.

Their replacement was Cabaret, which was certainly artful and "serious" (Nazi themes, bisexuality, the beating of a Jewish man in an alley) and "plausible"(all musical numbers were confined to the stage except for the "real" improvised-choir singing of "The Future Belongs to Me.") But Cabaret was rather its own private success...it didn't particularly launch a new desire in audiences to see grim and depressing realistic musicals.

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[–] movieghoul 9 years ago

In New York, both Dolly and Wagon had relatively short roadshow engagements, about 6 months. More successful roadshows had played anywhere from 1.5-2 years.

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