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Two big movies arrive in theaters this week, The Incredible Hulk and The Happening, and each has had its share of bad buzz. From what I can tell, though, the former is recuperating quite nicely with mostly favorable early reviews. And it’s sure to gross in the hundreds of millions, just like its big brother, Ang Lee’s Hulk, did a few years back. The latter, however, is still struggling through the muck, with writer-director M. Night Shyamalan doing everything he can to assure us that his film is merely a B-movie and shouldn’t be the victim of high expectations.

If The Happening bombs, though, 20th Century Fox won’t be able to blame its bad buzz. Especially if The Incredible Hulk comes out a big winner this weekend. When a movie is good, or at least has some goods that audiences actually crave, it can overcome bad buzz. The list of films after the jump is evidence of this, although it’s possible that some of the older titles might have been less successful in the globally conscious age of blogs.

1. Titanic - James Cameron’s romantic disaster film arrived in the early days of mass internet usage, but it didn’t need high-speed gossip to spread word of its troubled production. Any reader of entertainment news learned of the drug-induced food poisoning, the crew illnesses and injuries that came with filming in cold waters and the other problems that put the shoot way over schedule and way over budget. Then there was the matter of its release date being pushed back from July, 1997, to December. Yet Titanic had the goods, and it went on to become the highest-grossing film of all-time and win 11 Oscars, including Best Picture.
   
2. Star Wars - If the first Star Wars film were made today, it would likely receive a lot of bad press on the web. The production was marred by a number of problems that have since been made public over the last 30 years, and apparently some initial screenings were met with disappointing reactions. But just because the bad buzz didn’t make its way to the masses doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Much of the film’s cast and crew talked about how the movie was silly and would be a failure. My father, who was one of many illustrators commissioned to design the poster, also thought it looked stupid. And theater owners and studio execs weren’t that excited about it, either — considering this was already the beginning of the age of wide-releasing blockbusters, Star Wars‘ 32-screen opening was pretty slim. Right from that opening week, though, the movie was a smash hit, and of course its success and popularity only grew and grew.
3. Batman - Considering how much disdain there is these days from internerds towards Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman, I can only imagine what kind of bad buzz Tim Burton’s movie would have gotten had the forums and blogs been around in 1989. However, at the time, there was indeed hatred for Keaton’s casting and the film in general. The Los Angeles Times printed a letter from a fan that read: “By casting a clown in the lead role, Warner Bros. and Tim Burton have defecated on the history of Batman.” Also, according to Peter Bart’s book “Boffo”, comic book geeks at Comic-Con booed representatives from the film, and the Wall Street Journal featured a front-page article criticizing the film’s extensive marketing.
4. Ghost Rider - Like the casting of Keaton as Batman, Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider seemed a ridiculous choice to many fans. And the movie got dragged through the mud seemingly every time it was mentioned on the web over the many years it took for the comic adaptation to be made and then released. The nail on the coffin seemed to be Sony’s decision to bump it from August 2006 to the dead-man’s month of February, in the following year. Yet despite all that, plus negative reviews, it became a surprise hit.
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - Remember how we all reacted when it was announced Disney would make a movie based on a theme park ride? Remember how we all loved it when it was finally released?
6. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Another old film made before the scourge of the internet; another old film with bad buzz that seems to have remained hidden from the public at its time. Still, in “Boffo”, Bart claims that due to escalating costs and an overlong production (this was the first feature-length animated film from Disney and nobody knew how much or how long it would take) and the fact that studio execs didn’t believe audiences would go for such a long cartoon, “Hollywood tagged the production ‘Disney’s Folly.’”
7. Waterworld - This one was plagued by so much bad buzz that most people still think it bombed at the box office. And if you only look at the domestic numbers, it did. But this was around the time when Hollywood started realizing how much more money could be made from international b.o. and sell-through home video distribution (VHS was still big and the DVD breakthrough was around the corner), both of which overcompensated for lack of sufficient domestic gross.
8. Cleopatra - Another film that has a sort of unfair reputation for being a box office failure. Sure, it nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox, which indeed lost millions on the production. And sure, the scandalous affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton brought the film a lot of negative publicity around the world. But it was the top-grossing film of 1963 and was nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture. So, despite the bad buzz, tons of people went to see it, but there was no possible way for the thing to make any money.
9. Bee Movie - Everyone seemed to want this to fail, mostly because Jerry Seinfeld’s longtime marketing of the film was more obnoxious than anything experienced prior. And perhaps also because it was fun to refer to a bee having bad buzzzzzz. Yet children don’t follow buzz and so the movie did great business in the long term, even despite its inability to top the box office chart its opening weekend.
10. The Da Vinci Code - It wasn’t the first movie to garner negative publicity from religious groups, but it may have been the biggest production to be threatened by protest and criticism from as high up as the Vatican. Likewise, it probably wasn’t the first movie to be laughed at and booed during its Cannes premiere. But news of that reaction circled the globe/net very quickly. However, despite whatever protests there were and despite the near-universal panning of the film by critics, it was a huge success.