Box Office Poison

 Book 52 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from July 6 - 15

Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops

by Tim Robey

published 2024

My Opinion

2 stars

I checked this out from the library after seeing it in Bookpage.  

Although there were some interesting tidbits here and there, the majority of the book read like a book report of stats.  There were also multiple footnotes per page, sometimes even per sentence, and it really interrupted the flow.  Most of the footnotes could've been incorporated into the text with a little more effort in the structure and some of the footnotes should've been left out completely and included in the index.  For just one example, the movie Meet Joe Black was referenced in passing in 2 different chapters and there was a footnote both times; one footnote was "see also p. 172" and the other was "see also p. 209".  That isn't necessary; either the reader will remember the connection or they won't, it really didn't matter (and if the author felt like it did, explain why and make the connection in the actual text, not by a footnote that says nothing other than the movie is mentioned more than once).