These classic comedy movies were regarded as box office flops when they came out.
But they’ve all gained serious audiences as the years have gone by — and made many people laugh, even if not in theaters, when they were released.
Here’s to these comedy classics that were only discovered in home viewing.
Top Secret! (1984)
Paramount Pictures
The sad death of Val Kilmer earlier this year brought a renewed appreciation for his hilarious, unhinged, physics-defying 1984 comedy classic, which is like a parody of an Elvis movie crossed with a parody of a war movie. With a Blue Lagoon parody thrown in for no reason at all.
Kilmer plays an American music star who goes to East Germany to perform in a music festival. There, he meets Hilary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), who gets him unexpectedly involved in an underground resistance movement.
As Gutteridge says in Top Secret!, “I know, it all sounds like some bad movie.” But it isn’t. It’s a great movie.
This was the follow-up to Airplane!, the breakthrough for the team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (aka Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker) — who made a bevy of classic comedy movies. For our money, Top Secret! is their best.
Heathers (1988)
In hindsight, Heathers was always destined to be, at best, a cult classic. It’s a pitch-dark comedy about teens on a killing spree, and a terrific counterpoint to the average teen movie.
That being said, Heathers truly bombed. Winona Ryder was fresh off Beetlejuice, and Christian Slater was a teen heartthrob. Even so, a movie that only cost $3 million to make did not make its budget back. Heathers made a mere $1.1 million. That was fully domestically, as it didn’t get an international release.
Why were so few people interested? May we suggest a lot of people had brain tumors for breakfast?
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Dazed and Confused mined writer-director Richard Linklater’s Texas teenage years to create the best hangout movie of all time.
Linklater cast then-unknown and little-known actors Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Matthew McConaughey for a $6.9 million film that brought in only $8.2 million, but was played endlessly on Gen Xers VHS and later DVD players. (And Linklater’s next film, the also excellent Before Sunrise, made ten times its $2.5 million budget.)
Quentin Tarantino has called his “favorite movie of the 90s” and “maybe the only movie that three different generations of college students have seen multiple times.”
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Another eminently quotable movie, The Big Lebowski is so beloved that it spawned a Lebowski Fest and is regarded as one of the best films in the Coen brothers’ astonishing filmography.
Yet somehow it earned just over $19 million domestically on a budget of $15 million.
If you don’t think it’s a classic, well, that’s just like your opinion, man.
Office Space (1999)
20th Century Fox
When it came out in 1999, Mike Judge’s Office Space barely broke even at the box office on its $10 million budget.
Starring Ron Livingston as an average office worker named Peter Gibbons who is in love with a waitress played by Jennifer Aniston, Office Space is a dark comedy satire homage about office life in middle America.
It’s another film that was played endlessly on VHS and DVD, which helped it gain back financial ground.
But it also proved that Judge — best known as the time for Beavis and Butt-head — was also one of our most astute creators of live-action comedy.
Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
It’s summer, so the odds are good that even now, this charmer — with a stellar cast of future stars including Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Showalter, and Bradley Cooper — is playing at a revival house or outdoor screening near you.
That’s a testament to how well it holds up, even though it flopped on release, earning less than $300,000.
The movie also gained enough traction over the years to yield a sequel, Wet Hot American Summer: 10 Years Later, sixteen years later, in 2017.
Not Another Teen Movie (2001)
Before he was Captain America, Chris Evans starred in this cheeky comedy drama as a high school football star who makes a bet that he can turn an awkward girl into a prom queen.
It didn’t do that bad at the box office, making back a little over double its budget, but it was poorly reviewed at the time. Right now, it sits at 32% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. But it’s also come to be remembered quite fondly as an early 2000s parody genre movie, so that’s saying something.
We think about many jokes in this movie very often, especially “Oh it’s already been broughten.” If we judge what makes classic comedy movies by how hard they make us laugh, this one fares very well.
Team America: World Police (2004)
From the creators of South Park, this comedy stars a bunch of puppets with huge eyes, voiced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Lots of films claim to be equal opportunity offenders, but this one really delivers. The only people it seems to hate more than North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il… are Hollywood stars.
The film barely broke even on its $32 million budget, but at least they didn’t have to pay any big actor salaries.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
How did a film that had Michael Cera, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Kieran Culkin, Brie Larson and Mary Elizabeth Winston fail to gain traction at the box office? Scott Pilgrim has become a cult hit, and a source of endless memes, as well as featuring two Avengers.
Following the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, writer-director Edgar Wright turned to a graphic novel adaptation, reworking Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series and adding the music of Beck and Metric.
What went wrong? We have no idea — the movie’s a charmer, even if it failed to recoup its estimated $85 million budget.
But its fanbase grew over the years, justifying the release of a Netflix animated series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, featuring the entire original cast at a time when they were even more in demand.
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)
Everyone was wrong. This parody of pop superstardom, featuring some of the best work of The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, who honed their music video skills on Saturday Night Live) is a brilliant mix of smart and dumb jokes, and a soundtrack filled with earworms . (We’ve had “Finest Girl” stuck in our head for nearly a decade.)
It only earned back about half of its $20 million budget, but the film recently found a new audience since it recently arrived on Netflix, and the Lonely Island trio regularly recount it (and other successes and disappointments) on their terrific The Lonely Island and Seth Myers podcast. Righteous kill.
Also, if you like this gatling-gun approach to jokes (and we do), you’ll probably want to check out Schaffer’s new Naked Gun movie, with Liam Neeson taking over for Leslie Nielsen.
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006)
On a quest to find a legendary guitar pick that has magic powers, Tenacious D band mates Jack “JB” Black and Kyle “KG” Gass form an iconic friendship that could just lead to the creation of greatest rock band the world has never known.
Too bad this movie only made back a little over $8 million of its $20 million budget.
Of course, people came to get Jack Black much more than they did upon the film’s release: He recently led Minecraft, one of the biggest hits of the year.
Like This List of 11 Classic Comedy Movies That Bombed at the Box Office?
You might also like this list of Awesome 90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember or this list of the Funniest Comedy Movies We’ve Ever Seen.
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Main image: Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Universal Pictures.