Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

They cheered that this movie made the right decision to have little relation to its title’s source. In searching for audience responses to this movie, I was disheartened to find a few fans who considered the second book to be way worse than the first. No one here needs to be reminded that the idea of releasing a sequel to Alice in Wonderland exactly six years later and calling it Through the Looking Glass has been done before. (Except for Johnny Depp, but we’ll get back to that.) Was it a Heaven’s Gate -level fiasco that will end anyone’s career? Also no. That cocktail of the zeitgeist put a lot of butts in seats, but did it generate a love for the ‘Underland’ universe that left people still hungry for a sequel six years later? Decidedly no. That movie was a success because of a brilliant marketing campaign, the big names making it, and culturally perfect timing for a nostalgic Alice movie. It was greenlit in the first place because Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland made over a billion dollars worldwide, and is still one of the top twenty-five highest grossing films of all-time. It cost $170 Million to make and brought back in just $35 Million over Memorial Day Weekend. This movie didn’t flop because it was a bad movie. The week after it opened saw many news outlets performing autopsies for why an installment in a beloved franchise with A-list stars tanked as hard as it did. Disney also owns Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar. They just don’t make flops like they used to! Although Rolling Stone pronounced Alice Through the Looking Glass “floppier than the average flop,” there’s very few people who will lose their heads as a result of this failure. Ishtar ’s budget ballooned to $50 Million dollars and it took in only $14 Million, killing a the director’s career. Seven years later, director Elaine May thought that Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty would be funny as a hapless songwriting duo who get involved in a Middle Eastern guerrilla war. The fiasco caused the studio United Artists to collapse. The critical backlash to Cimino’s hubris led to the film making only $3.5 million at the box office. Heaven’s Gate, an even grander Western epic, went spectacularly over budget, costing $44 million dollars. In 1978, Michael Cimino took home the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for his epic, The Deer Hunter, and was thus given a free pass to make whatever he wanted next.

Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll