It’s not exactly original to label Josie and the Pussycats a good movie in 2021 (Jezebel interviewed Rachel Leigh Cook about its legacy this week), but you can’t call me a latecomer to the trend: I was one of the few who saw it in the theater in 2001 (final box office gross: $14.9 million), and I was an instant fan (I definitely liked it more than the only other people at my showing—a mom and her two young daughters, who seemed confused about why I was laughing so much).

Once dismissed as a formulaic post-Girl Power rags-to-rock riches story, the film has been reassessed as a smart satire with a great cast (which includes Rosario Dawson, Alan Cumming, Parker Posy, and Tara Reid) and an irresistible pop punk soundtrack.

Where to stream: HBO Max

Michael Mann is so revered as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, it’s easy to forget how many of his movies have fared poorly in theaters (1999's The Insider lost $30 million, but got seven Oscar nominations). One of his most infamous in that regard is this techno-thriller starring a mid-Thor Chris Hemsworth, which cost $70 million and made $8 million in the U.S. And it’s great!

Hemsworth displays real charisma (and range) as an ex-con hacker tasked with saving the world from cyberterrorists, and the intricate plot spools out masterfully—at least since Mann tinkered with the editing to produce his director’s cut, which is the one to watch if you can find it (it’s currently not streaming anywhere).

Where to stream: MaxGo, DirecTV

Cats is the last film I saw in theaters before the pandemic. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just something I have to live with. But while I can’t quite argue that this horrifically misaligned adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical about...cats doesn’t deserve its 19% Rotten Tomatoes score, it’s too mesmerizingly confounding to avoid entirely; indeed, you might find yourself drawn into its strange cult and start attending jubilant midnight sing-along screenings (you know, eventually). Even if you don’t, I can’t imagine witnessing a CGI feline version of Judy Dench sing-talking about the difference between cats and dogs won’t leave you forever changed.

Where to stream: HBO Max

Up front: Spike Lee’s Oldboy is not worth watching in lieu of the original South Korean film from award-winning director Park Chan-wook—you definitely want to experience that one first, because this 2013 Americanization is a much less effective version of the story (which isn’t to say an uninteresting one).

Josh Brolin plays a man who is kidnapped and held in a hotel room for 20 years, only to be suddenly released and forced to figure out why—and seek his revenge. Lee’s version recalls Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho: it twists and turns on its own, yet some scenes are unmistakably copied straight from the source. I’m glad I saw it; it definitely deserved to make more than a measly $5 million (the biggest bomb of Lee’s storied career).

Where to stream: The Roku Channel

Writer/director Elaine May’s folly has long been synonymous with the hubris of Hollywood, the epitome of a flop: an outrageously expensive dry “comedy” starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as a pair of half-talented musicians unwittingly drawn into a foreign policy disaster in the fictional middle eastern nation of the title. It lost so much money (nearly $100 million in today’s dollars), it remains infamous decades later, despite the fact that almost no one has seen it (it lost so much money, you see).

Well, give it a rental and you’ll discover: It’s actually pretty good, particularly the first half, the kind of rambling, good-natured, star-filled romp they really don’t make anymore.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Vin Diesel cashed in his xXx and The Fast and the Furious cred to make this convoluted RPG campaign of a sequel to David Twohy’s spare sci-fi thriller Pitch Black (2000). If you’re asking yourself why, the answer is pretty simple: Vin Diesel is a huge nerd.

Did the world need to learn that good-hearted criminal who could see in the dark was actually part of an ancient space-faring civilization known as “Furyans”? I would posit it did not (and in fact many people did not bother to learn it at all—it grossed just $57 million in the U.S. against a budget of over $100 million). But that doesn’t mean I, also a huge nerd, was not there for it opening weekend, and I declare it: Pretty good. I mean, Judy Dench, again.

Where to stream: Peacock

It’s not every movie that can say it got its studio shut down, but, well, director Brad Bird’s E.T.-like period fable about a alien machine that crash lands in the Red Scare America of the 1950s and the young boy who befriends him tanked so badly ($23 million U.S. against a $5o million budget) that Warner Bros. Animation essentially abandoned its feature-length ambitions in the wake of its release.

But critics loved it from the start, and audiences soon found it on DVD—especially after the release of Pixar’s The Incredibles boosted Bird’s reputation. By 2018, the title character was well-known enough to receive a major cameo in Steven Spielberg’s shared IP extravaganza Ready Player One, and is also expected to be found in the next big IP crossover, Space Jam: A New Legacy.

Where to stream: Hulu

Fight Club failed in theaters (grossing about half what it cost to make) but was already on its way to cult status by the time it arrived on DVD in an elaborate multi-disc set filled with breathlessly exhaustive special features examining every facet of its production. Judging by its lasting impact on film (its primary twist becoming something of a narrative shorthand) and culture in general (certain audiences’ misreadings of its message are...problematic), its legacy seems assured, which is to say, you’ve probably seen Edward Norton and Brad Pitt meet cute, fight cute, and then start an underground boxing club-turned-terrorist organization plenty of times already.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Crass cult film icon John Waters found mainstream success with 1988's Hairspray, a ‘50s period musical about an unflappable young woman’s obsession with appearing on a teen dance show, so his followup—a ‘50s period musical about an unflappable young woman’s obsession with a good-hearted hoodlum (played by Johnny Depp in peak teen pinup form)—seemed a good bet.

Nope: It made around $8 million on a $12 million budget and vanished into video store obscurity. But its tale of singing toughs and the girls who love them proved too irresistible, and it eventually attracted the cult audience it deserved—to the point it was even remade as a Tony-nominated (if quickly shuttered) Broadway musical, walking much the same path as Hairspray (which went from movie to stage and back again).

Where to stream: Starz, DirecTV

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s box office success often pales in comparison to his critical cred, but he never swung bigger and missed so badly ($8 million gross on a $20 million budget) than with this, the first ever cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel.

In retrospect, it’s no surprise a confounding, convoluted, drugged-out LA noir built on an alienating performance by Joaquin Phoenix didn’t exactly light the world on fire, but like all of PTA’s films, every frame is worth watching—no working director (save maybe Wes Anderson) is so tonally consistent—and maybe with enough re-viewings, the plot will start to make sense.

Where to stream: Tubi

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was to be a comeback of sorts, both for a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey, Jr. and for writer/director Shane Black, years removed from penning ‘80s hits like Lethal Weapon. Yet despite an enthusiastic critical response, it managed just $4 million at the U.S. box office—though, like most of these movies, it wound up finding its crowd on DVD. It’s worth watching both for its glimpse of an actor on the brink of career-changing global superstardom and its funny, fast-moving plot—a tongue-in-cheek homage to hardboiled Hollywood noir.

Where to stream: Tubi

After directing both of The Godfather films to blockbuster grosses and critical acclaim—not to mention redefining the war film with Apocalypse Now—Francis Ford Coppola could seemingly do no wrong, which is probably how he managed to secure a $23 million budget for this stagey, highly artificial, contemporary Las Vegas-set ode to classic musicals.

After a troubled, pricey production, early screenings of the film went so poorly that many distributors elected not to show it, resulting in a disastrous sub-$1 million box office gross that nearly spelled the end of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. It’s hardly a movie for everyone, but you can clearly see its slice-of-city life influence in later Oscar sensation La La Land, and even a misfire from Coppola is worth seeing at least once.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Director Gore Verbinski took a step back from popcorn epics like The Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lone Ranger for this twisted, small-scale homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. A young businessman (Dane DeHaan) is sent to retrieve his boss from a “wellness retreat” in the Swiss Alps and encounters a strange, insular community lorded over by a sinister doctor (Jason Isaacs), and soon finds himself subject to disturbing experiments. The deeply weird plot, involving blood-thirsty leeches and a quest for immortality, alienated theatrical audiences, but like all of Verbinski’s movies, this one is too visually inventive to miss—and it plays pretty well when streamed late at night (possibly after you’ve partaken of your own “cure” for what’s ailing you).

Where to stream: Digital rental

Sandwiched in-between Guillermo del Toro’s summer blockbuster Pacific Rim and his Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water is this painterly ode to gothic horror—a lurid, oversexed haunted house potboiler in which a budding novelist (Mia Wasikowska) marries a wealthy aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) and travels to his family’s remote, crumbling mansion, where she runs afoul of the convoluted relationship between her new groom and his sister (Jessica Chastain), with whom he shares a terrible secret.

The film is a visual marvel—the decrepit estate, haunted by bloody specters, is a wonder of production design—more than making up for its somewhat overcooked Grand Guignol plotting.

Where to stream: Netflix

The Coen brothers’ drug-fueled bowling alley noir The Big Lebowski famously threw a gutter ball in theaters before stoners propelled it into a massive cult success on video, and I’d like to see the same sort of reassessment of this earlier flop, a blackly comic morality play about the inventor of the hula hoop (Tim Robbins) that’s like a dark reflection of the screwball comedies of the 1940s. The zany characters and over-the-top visuals might have you wondering what it’s all about, but you’ll honestly be too entertained to really care.

Where to stream: Tubi

John Carter’s failure seems one of timing. Released a few years post-Avatar, it arrived just as audiences were growing weary of 3-D special effects extravaganzas, and the marketing never managed to justify its existence—admittedly a challenge when adapting source material (the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs) that established sci-fi/fantasy tropes long since passed into cliché.

Yet like two other would-be outer space blockbusters appearing later on this list (see if you can spot them), it’s far better than its damaged reputation. Taylor Kitsch is suitably heroic as a Civil War soldier mysteriously transported to the surface of Mars, the unusual environment granting him the superhuman abilities he needs to change the course of an alien war; in his first live-action film, director (and Pixar-mainstay) Andrew Stanton brings real dimension to a bunch of impressive CGI effects.

Where to stream: Disney+

One weird, dour Terry Gilliam “children’s” movie was a hit—1981's Time Bandits—so why not this one? Unfortunately, this chronicle of the high-flying adventures of oddball aristocrat Baron Munchausen (John Neville) cost way too much ($46 million) and made way too little ($8 million). But its episodic plot, which takes you on an airship to the moon, on a voyage under the sea, and beyond, plays well on video—and it’s fun seeing future stars like Sarah Polley and Uma Thurman in early roles.

Where to stream: Digital rental

With the notable exception of the Disney animated version, Hollywood just can’t quite seem to make Peter Pan happen—though not for a lack of trying. And none of these box office misfires hurts worse than the abject failure of this faithful 2003 adaptation, which hews closely to the original novel and casts real, actual kids in the lead roles of Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) and Peter (Jeremy Sumpter) against Jason Isaac’s fiendish Captain Hook. Director P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding) perfectly captures the tension of the metaphor at the heart of this story about near-adolescents who never want to grow up.

Where to stream: Pluto

Director Danny Boyle brings an arthouse flair to this sci-fi drama, which attempts to take a grounded approach to the story of a ragtag crew of astronauts’ desperate mission to reignite our dying sun (at least until the last 30 minutes, when it makes a hard turn into thriller territory). An odd sense of elegiac sadness hangs over the whole affair—Armageddon this ain’t, which might be why it made a mere $4 million in the U.S.—but more patient genre fans will find its arresting, sun-scorched imagery and strives for realism entirely rewarding.

Where to stream: Digital rental

I totally get why this somber, painterly western—a nearly three-hour loose biography of the title characters that favors long silences and artful visuals over plot momentum—didn’t exactly become a summer blockbuster, but still, you’d think a piece of awards-bait starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck would do better than $4 million in ticket sales. If you have any patience for the genre, though, its a must-see—coupled with career-best work from cinematographer Roger Deakins, the sober tone and measured pacing become almost hypnotic.

Where to stream: Roku, DirecTV, Fubo

That Edgar Wright managed to pull off the best comic book adaptation of all time, if for a comic with extremely niche appeal, and still see it fail to find an audience is all too appropriate: The slacker title character (Michael Cera), a part-time musician and full-time misanthrope living in early aughts Toronto, would scoff at becoming too popular.

Though buzz for it lit up Comic-Con, no one came out to theaters (where it grossed about half of the $60 million it cost to make) to see Scott engage in video game duels with his girlfriend Ramona’s (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) “seven evil exes” to win her hand (no one except me), but its Geriatric Millennial nostalgia appeal (not to mention a cast of future stars like Aubrey Plaza and Brie Larson) has won it a legion of fans after the fact.

Where to stream: Netflix

Given how often The Lonely Island’s Saturday Night Live parody songs would become viral sensations, I can’t quite figure out why this story of the rise and fall of a loud-mouthed musician didn’t take off—it’s basically a feature-length adaptation of “I’m on a Boat.” Yet just five years later, and despite making less than $10 million in the U.S., it is already often spoken of alongside the best lowbrow comedies of the last decade, which isn’t nothing. If you’ve any affection for its sister box office disappoint-turned-cult smash Walk Hard ($20 million against a $35 million budget), put it on your weekend playlist.

Where to stream: FXNow, DirecTV, Fubo

Iconic star of short stature Danny DeVito had weird side-career as a director, bouncing from the over-the-top divorce comedy of The War of the Roses, to the acid-tinged children’s film Matilda, to this outright misfire, a nasty noir of the preschool entertainment set in which a down-on-his-luck TV host (Robin Williams) concocts a vicious scheme to obliterate his upstart rival, a purple rhino-costumed Edward Norton. It’s crass and violent enough that I’m not shocked no one wanted to see it in theaters (where it made $8 million on a $50 million budget), nor am I surprised it found more amenable audiences on DVD.

Where to stream: Digital rental

On paper, this one should’ve been a massive success: a romantic comedy pairing Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, written and directed by playwright John Patrick Shanley, who’d just won an Oscar for Moonstruck. And yet: Turns out 1990 audiences didn’t know what to make of a weird fable about a man with a fatal illness who ventures to the South Pacific to throw himself into a volcano. Its highly artificial screwball flair did eventually find its adherents, but not until it had already garnered a reputation as a poorly conceived box office disappointment.

Where to stream: Tubi

You mean to tell me audiences in 1989 couldn’t appreciate this black-as-night teen comedy satire about a pair of murderous high school students (Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) getting revenge against a same-named clique of awful rich girls? What was their damage? Luckily, this devilish romp from Daniel Waters (whose brother Mark would find success with the similarly sharp but more broadly appealing Mean Girls) hasn’t aged a day in the decades since it managed to earn just $1 million in theaters (well, except for the gay panic stuff... and the fact that it would never, ever be made today).

Where to stream: Prime Video, Hulu

A sure thing that sure wasn’t, this adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s blockbuster novel, a long-winded saga of 1980s excess, became an infamous flop even before its 1990 release, despite the involvement of award-winning director Brian De Palma and a cast that includes big stars like Melanie Griffith, Tom Hanks, and Bruce Willis.

At the time it was regarded as a poor take on a zeitgeist-y book, and scraped out just a third of its $47 million budget in ticket sales, but it plays better at a remove—when’s the last time anyone actually read The Bonfire of the Vanities?—or as a companion piece to the dishy 1991 book The Devil’s Candy, journalist Julie Salamon’s no-holds-barred, fly-on-the-wall account of its troubled production.

Where to stream: Digital rental, on HBO Max June 1

Warner Bros. recently announced plans to remake this stylish 1983 vampire flick, which seems ill-advised: Director Tony Scott brought the full weight of his music video aesthetic to his adaptation of the pulpy Whitley Strieber novel, basically defining the “glampire” goth aesthetic that would become a cliché by the time Buffy the Vampire Slayer appeared on TV, and it’s hard to imagine it any other way. But there’s also the matter of trying to improve on roles inhabited by the likes of Susan Sarandon (as a naive geneticist), Catharine Deneuve (as an immortal succubus), and, most of all, the late David Bowie (as an ageless killer suddenly grappling with his own mortality). Sure, the plot is nigh-incomprehensible nonsense—but the style.

Where to stream: Digital rental

I was so excited for this sci-fi spectacle—a lifelong passion project for director Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, Lucy)—that I almost saw it in a theater in Paris while on vacation, dubbed into French. Perhaps that would have been a better bet, because the occasionally atrocious dialogue and the miscast leads are basically my only problems with this overclocked live-action cartoon.

Appealing elsewhere, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne display an aloof hipster anti-chemistry as Valerian and Laureline, two government agents of humanity’s space-faring future who get pulled into a colorful conspiracy on the titular space station, but everything around them—from the eye-popping production design (ripped from the pages of the original French comics), to the supporting cast (including Rhianna as a sexy blob alien), to the propulsive episodic plotting—is impossible to resist. Switch language tracks, pop on the subtitles (or don’t bother), and enjoy.

Where to stream: Digital rental

A bold choice, I know—Muppets From Space is no one’s favorite Muppet movie. But it’s also far better than its reputation as the nadir of the beloved felt creations’ storied career. As with any Muppet film, the plot—about blue Weirdo Gonzo’s hunt for his origins (the title deserves a spoiler alert)—is just a framework upon which to hang Muppet-y antics and recognizable human cameos (including a totally game Jeffrey Tambor as an eternally exasperated government agent). It fared so poorly in theaters (failing to earn back its $24 million budget) that it put the Jim Henson creations in mothballs for more than a decade.

Where to stream: Prime Video

Disney’s attempt to appeal to the non-princess crowd with a spacefaring adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island—long a passion project for co-directors Ron Clements and John Musker—tanked so badly (losing some $75 million) that it basically signaled the end of traditional 2-D animation at the Mouse House (in-development projects like Tangled and Frozen quickly pivoted to CGI). And yet despite a super made-in-the-year-2000 aesthetic (the lead’s floppy boy band hair; that “space surfing” sequence), it’s actually an entertaining, imaginative update of the original story, and one of the most handsome animated films ever made. (Kids who grew up with it seem to agree.)

Where to stream: Disney+

It’s hard to say why Guy Ritchie’s protege Matthew Vaughn found success (and a franchise) with the 2014 spy action comedy Kingsmen: The Secret Service while Ritchie himself had no luck the next year with this clever reboot of the cult 1960s TV series The Man From UNCLE. Starring Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer (problematic!), it similarly walks the line between serious action and genre spoof, moving at a mile a minute between elaborate effects sequences and clever gags as its titular secret agent gets involved in international spy hijinks. (Spy-jinks?) I’d love a sequel, but the poor box office returns ($45 million U.S. on a budget of over $100 million) probably means I’ll have to be content with what I have.

Where to stream: Digital rental

This low-key science fiction drama from director Andrew Niccol (writer of The Truman Show) feels eerily prescient despite getting basically nothing of the future right. In “the not-too-distant future,” wealthy elites genetically engineer perfect children in the womb (“valids”), making life doubly difficult for natural born “in-valids” like Vincent (Ethan Hawke), who attempts to pass himself off as a valid in order to participate in an historic space mission. The setup is the stuff of classic sci-fi, favoring intellectual fireworks and moral musing over flashy special effects, and it took a while to find an appreciative audience, earning only a third of its $36 million budget in ticket sales.

Where to stream: Starz, DirecTV

The behind-the-camera talent for this bio-pic of 1980s outsider comic Andy Kauffman couldn’t be more impressive: An Oscar-winning director in Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), acclaimed screenwriters (Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who penned the bio-pics Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt), and the talents of producer/star (and Kauffman confidant) Danny DeVito. Yet it seems 1999 audiences just didn’t want to see Jim Carrey in serious mode; he totally nails his portrayal of the troubled comedy legend, but couldn’t appeal to the Oscars (though he did win a Golden Globe) or audiences (the movie limped to $47 million against an $82 million budget). It’s a suitably risk-taking, beguiling take on the life of an unknowable celebrity who remained a mystery even in death.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Based on the novel by capital-W Weird writer Jeff VanderMeer, this 2018 sci-fi thriller film wanders away from the plot of the book but tells a similarly unsettling story of a group of women scientists who venture within a strange unnatural phenomenon known as “the Shimmer,” from which no one has emerged (with their sanity intact, anyway) since it suddenly appeared in the wilds of the southeastern U.S.

Director Alex Garland’s followup to the critically lauded Ex-Machina, it was to be one of Paramount’s tentpole releases—until the studio got cold feet and sold off the foreign rights to Netflix, and put the least amount of effort possible into a cursory domestic release. Still, critical support was there early on, and genre fans seem to have embraced it as a heady ecological horror fable.

Where to stream: FXNow, Sling

The Wachowskis have made a cottage industry out of directing ambitious genre films that utterly fail to connect with audiences, starting with their 2008 adaptation of the Japanese anime Speed Racer, a perfect live-action encapsulation of a cartoon’s manic energy that alienated critics upon initial release, leading to a $43 million U.S. gross on a $120 million budget (and here I must again point out I saw this one in the theater; it rules).

They fared a bit better with their sprawling take on David Mitchell’s “unfilmable” time-spanning cyclical novel Cloud Atlas in 2012, which made $130 million worldwide but still lost massive amounts of money, only to find themselves shuttled off to director jail after their fairy tale sci-fi epic Jupiter Ascending face-planted in 2015, resulting in a $100 million loss for Warner Bros. and sending Lana Wachowski running back to the more comfortable confines of the Matrix franchise for her next film.

Lumpy and misshapen and tonally inconsistent as they all are, these films feel like the rare big budget spectacles that are the product of a singular vision, and very much deserving of a second chance.

Where to stream: Tubi (Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas), Netflix (Jupiter Ascending)