![]() This is close to the average gross of the silent films ($60M excluding The Saphead) while there were no big hits like The Navigator, Our Hospitality, and Battling Butler, there were no disappointing flops like Spite Marriage or Steamboat Bill, Jr. It is remarkable how consistently the first four sound features performed, grossing the modern equivalent of between $50M and $60M each. The graph shows the silent features in blue and the MGM sound features in purple. grossed about 33% less than even The General. (1928), which ironically went over budget due more to Schenck's insistence on replacing a flood with a cyclone than to Keaton's creative ideas. This led to Keaton's last independent feature, Steamboat Bill, Jr. College (1927)-designed to be quicker, less expensive, and more traditional than The General (modeled after Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, 1925)-proved to be Keaton's least commercially successful feature up to that time. The General, in fact, grossed only a little more than half as much as The Navigator, and almost 40% less than Battling Butler.Īfter The General, Joe Schenck took control over costs and, as a result, Keaton's creative freedom. ![]() Overspending his initial $400,000 budget and arguing with Joe Schenck throughout, Keaton put everything he had into The General, but the unfortunate result was a film that grossed even less than Go West, while costing considerably more. ![]() With the financial success of Battling Butler, Keaton embarked on the production of his pride and joy, The General. The two films based on stage plays were successful, with Seven Chances grossing almost $73M in today's dollars and Battling Butler grossing $81M, but Go West was financially disappointing, grossing less than any of the features before it except for The Saphead. (described on the film's Wikipedia page as "his first real failure after a then 25-year career on stage and screen") was reversed later that same year when The Navigator (1924) became Keaton's biggest hit of the silent era, grossing $94M in today's dollars.Īfter The Navigator, the middle period of Keaton's silent films-Seven Chances (1925), Go West (1925), and Battling Butler (1926)-were a mixed bag in terms of box office reception. grossed about 25% less than Our Hospitality, and this financial turn might have been one reason Keaton considered Sherlock, Jr. (1924), now regarded as one of Keaton's best films and by many as a rival to The General as Keaton's masterpiece. Our Hospitality was followed by Sherlock, Jr. box office performance of Buster Keaton's silent features in millions of dollars, adjusted to current dollars, based on UMR's statistics. (I think the box office data only include the original theatrical run, but any grosses from re-releases would probably be negligible for Keaton's features, unlike grosses from re-rereleases for things like Disney animated movies, etc.) The box office grosses are adjusted to modern dollars, which allows us to compare the silent features with each other, but also allows us to see in broad terms how they compare with modern movies. I am using data from Ultimate Movie Rankings, which presents box office data for most of Keaton's features. Let's take a more quantitative look at the performance of the silent features. (1928), but the end result was even lower box office receipts than The General. As the story goes, The General's box office failure caused Joe Schenck to assign a production supervisor to oversee College (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. ![]() The popularity of Buster Keaton's silent features has waxed and waned over the decades since they were created nearly a century ago, but how were they received when they were first released?Īnecdotes abound concerning the discrepancies between the current critical esteem of the films and their initial box office reception, most famously the fact that The General (1926), now considered Keaton's masterpiece, was initially a box office flop.
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