With an equally talented production team and an adequate budget they could have had a big hit.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song indeed constituted a pretty big hit back in 1971; back then, a gross of $15M proved quite large. Indeed, according to the data here, the film ranked tenth in domestic grosses among movies released in 1971.
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/year/1971Now, that data is neither complete nor fully accurate (for instance, the domestic gross of
Dirty Harry was actually $35.976M, and the $7.5M figure for the John Wayne Western
Big Jake is actually the domestic rentals total, meaning that the movie's domestic gross was about twice as large), but it provides a 'ballpark' perspective. In fact,
Sweetback topped the weekly box office three times in a four-week span during the spring of 1971.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1971_box_office_number-one_films_ in_the_United_States
Overall that year,
Sweetback actually out-grossed the more accessible, mainstream, MGM-produced, and famous
Shaft, and what's really remarkable is that Melvin Van Peebles' film proved so successful despite being so avante-garde (or cheap, depending upon one's perspective), racially incendiary, sexually explicit (especially for the time), and generally controversial and iconoclastic. Remember that this film infamously received an "X" rating (which Van Peebles claimed was a sign of racism, a charge that probably doesn't stand up to scrutiny, although his complaint about a lack of diversity on the ratings panel was certainly warranted) and found no distributor among major Hollywood studios, eventually turning to the exploitation company Cinemation.
Sweetback has to stand among the most financially successful independent films ever produced, and with a bigger budget, it may have lost the rawness that rendered it so compelling to audiences.
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