![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. Three other Keaton films received votes in the magazine's survey: Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr., and The Navigator.ĭescription above from the Wikipedia article Buster Keaton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.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. A 2002 worldwide poll by Sight & Sound ranked Keaton's The General as the 15th best film of all time. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929, he worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."Orson Welles stated that Keaton's The General is the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Keaton the 21st-greatest male star of all time. Keaton was recognized as the seventh-greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly. ![]() He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". Buster Keaton (Octo– February 1, 1966) was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. ![]()
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