The Iron Giant Bombed At The Box Office, And The Studio Was To Blame

1999 is often cited as one of the best years in cinema history — if not the single greatest year. From “The Matrix” to “The Sixth Sense” and everything in between, it’s a year that birthed a number of classics that we’d be lucky to get within a five-year span, let alone a single year. One of the films on that impressively long list is director Brad Bird’s feature directorial debut “The Iron Giant.” Now cited as one of the most cherished animated films of the ’90s, it was rather shockingly a straight-up flop in its day. Why, exactly? Warner Bros. is almost solely to blame.

As “The Iron Giant” celebrates its 25th anniversary, it’s worth looking back at the film about a young boy named Hogarth in the ’50s who befriends a curious robot who is designed as a weapon yet becomes this boy’s best friend. It’s worth explaining the state of animation in the ’90s to help understand what happened with this film. After Disney experienced monster box office hits with films like “The Lion King” and “Aladdin,” other studios decided to try and get in on the action. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out as well for those who just wanted in on the gold rush.

Warner Bros. rushed to replicate Disney’s success and the result was 1998’s infamous flop “Quest for Camelot,” which nearly killed “Iron Giant” dead in its tracks. As a result, Bird was given a much smaller budget to work with, reportedly in the $50 million range. “They did leave us alone if we kept it in control and showed them we were producing the film responsibly and getting it done on time and doing stuff that was good,” Bird explained in a 1999 interview. “We were definitely watched closely. But when we were delivering, they were good enough to stay away and let us make the film.”

WB may have let Bird and the team make the film but the studio still needed to get behind it once it was finished. That’s where things get tricky. In a 2015 interview with JoBlo, Bird revealed that “Quest for Camelot” was something of a last straw for the studio, which essentially led to Warner Bros. abandoning animation altogether:

“They were like ‘That’s it, we’re out of animation.’ So they were basically, we were perceived as a film that would be finished and put on the shelf until there was a hole or something in the release schedule in the future. And then we’d be plugged in. They wouldn’t give us a release date, they didn’t have any hopes. They just thought animation wasn’t going to really work for them.”

Instead, WB focused on other 1999 titles, including a very expensive marketing campaign for Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West,” which ended up flopping badly. The studio also delayed setting a release date until April, which made marketing almost impossible. McDonald’s had a tie-in for “Inspector Gadget.” Warner Bros. had no such thing for “The Iron Giant.”

“Our exit poll results have been outstanding,” Bird explained to the Los Angeles Times shortly after the film hit theaters. “Once we get people into the theater for the first minute, they love it. But the challenge has been getting them into the theater at all — a lot of people simply aren’t aware that the film is even out there.”

To further complicate matters, the film was also coming on the heels of the Columbine shooting in April, which brought gun violence to the center of the political conversation. Its effects rippled through the media landscape, with episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” shelved in the aftermath. As Bird has pointed out, his pitch to the studio was, “What I pitched was ‘What if a gun had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun?'”

“The Iron Giant” is a movie that strongly condemns violence. In theory, that should have been very marketable at the time. It also didn’t hurt that, as time has proved, Bird made a fantastic movie. That much was clear from the film’s test screenings, which went incredibly well. This caught Warner Bros. off guard, as Bird pointed out in that same JoBlo interview:

“Warners was shocked by the test screening. They weren’t ready for the film, meaning they hadn’t laid all the groundwork you’re supposed to lay, with fast food restaurants, cereals, teasers, posters. We only had one poster and it was a teaser poster. We never had a real poster.”

Warner Bros. would have had to convince average moviegoers that animation isn’t just for kids. Pixar was only a few years removed from the breakout success of “Toy Story,” so that narrative was changing, but it hadn’t fully changed just yet. Bird, in that same interview, explained that the studio sort of knew it screwed up and did its best to scramble at the 11th hour:

“To be fair to them they actually knew that they screwed up when the film turned out the way it did and it scored so highly. They said, ‘We should delay it and properly lead up to its release,’ and I said ‘You guys have had two and a half years to get ready for this.’ I was feeling confident due to the test scores but it needed eight and I think we got five, and we were done. Even if everyone told everyone they knew, it wasn’t enough to hang in there.”

While Bird’s frustration with Warner Bros. is understandable, as was his confidence given the reactions to the film, with no marketing in place it was a doomed enterprise. It certainly didn’t hurt that on the weekend of August 6, 1999, when “The Iron Giant” hit theaters, M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout success “The Sixth Sense” also arrived on the scene. Further complicating matters was “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the most profitable horror films of all time right alongside “Paranormal Activity.” The found-footage sensation was in its fourth weekend and continuing to gain steam.

“The Iron Giant” got buried, making just $5.7 million on opening weekend, placing ninth on the charts. To date, the film has only made $31.3 million worldwide, or just over half of its production budget. It was by no measure a commercial success in its day. Fortunately, time has been very kind to the film in the years since its original release.

People eventually caught up with Bird’s acclaimed crowd-pleaser on home video, and it has since become a true classic. Vin Diesel, who voiced the titular robot, even playfully teased a possible “Iron Giant” sequel back in 2015. That never came to pass, but it speaks volumes about how the legacy of this film has grown over the past 25 years.

Much attention is paid to the box office in the movie business. It can make or break careers. It’s how money is largely lost or made in filmmaking. Yet, “The Iron Giant” is the perfect example of how box office doesn’t always tell the whole story. This is a movie that came together at precisely the wrong time and Warner Bros. didn’t know what it had until it was too late. Fortunately, the cream rose to the top and Bird’s animated masterpiece achieved a greater form of immortality as an enduring, cherished piece of the broader pop culture canon.