At last....RENT-A-COP

[Paul MacLean]

He also got the score out on a major label (Columbia) which likely served him well -- even if it was mainly because BROWN EYED GIRL was on it!

Can we assume it sold more copies than Not Without My Daughter?

I admit I've never been very good at keeping track of box office figures. Of course I'm aware It's Pat underperformed just a bit...but I was always under the impression that The Mission and The Rocketeer were hits, until you revealed otherwise!

[AndyDursin]

THE MISSION gave off the impression it was a success because it was up for a bunch of Oscars and Morricone's score was popular. The album sold great, but the film itself was a flop, only grossed $17 million worldwide and cost $24 million not counting promotion and the like. Between that and REVOLUTION being a bomb Goldcrest took it on the chin and didn't last long.

THE ROCKETEER was a disappointment, opened at #3 at the box-office and died before they could make sequels. $46 million was an underwhelming gross for a movie that cost $34 mil at the time and had massive amounts of promotion and publicity for a big Summer movie.

Here's Guardian article from the movie's 30th anniversary stating as much -- and that it should have been a big hit.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/j ... r-connelly

I think with THE ROCKETEER that it was a letdown more than an outright bomb -- people did like the film and it had a following on home video. But it cost a lot and was intended to launch a series which failed to happen.

[Monterey Jack]

The Rocketeer was the Dick Tracy of 1991...a movie that cost so much that Disney scuppered plans for any hoped-for sequels, even though neither one was an outright bomb. They were obviously hoping both of them would turn out to be the new Tim Burton Batman (or Indiana Jones, given The Rocketeer's 1930s setting and dastardly Nazi villains), but the franchises they had in mind never materialized.

It's funny, considering how superhero IPs rule Hollywood these days, that that spate of post-Batman comic book flicks in the 90s led to virtually no sequels. Darkman, The Shadow, The Phantom (even that 1990-91 one-season TV version of The Flash)...it wasn't until Blade than even one comic book movie outside of the Batman franchise yielded a sequel. Wait, there was The Crow, but who remembers the sequel to that? It wasn't until X-Men and Spider-Man in the early 2000s that pretty much any decently-performing superhero movie got at least one sequel.

[AndyDursin]

They are a little different, because DICK TRACY was profitable and was much more of a one-and-done "cinematic event." They were hoping it would make BATMAN level dollars, yes, but with Warren Beatty in charge and how he made movies (he'd go YEARS inbetween them), I can't imagine there was a real expectation that was going to start a "franchise" and generate numerous sequels. He was never going to do that, nor was Disney going to duplicate that level of production with Oscar-level talents involved in the physical production across the board -- not to mention that cast. It did make money -- it ended up in the Top 10 for 1990 -- so it wasn't close to being a flop, but given the fact it was Warren Beatty, Madonna, and all the people involved, it was a whole different set of expectations because it was the highest profile movie of that summer and...well, it wasn't BATMAN.

THE ROCKETEER on the other hand wasn't profitable at all, which was too bad. They didn't spend DICK TRACY money (they didn't have to pay the likes of Beatty and Madonna lol) but the movie just did mediocre business even though they had flooded the market with games and advertising. I do have a fantastic memory of seeing that movie, on vacation with my parents in Toronto, where we went to some REALLY old movie house and sat in the upper balcony's front row. It was like a movie palace out of the '30s but had been updated for THX and had the best sound I had ever heard anywhere. Perfect movie for it!