Kevin Smith stopped by Shannen Doherty‘s podcast this week where the director learned a surprising (and frustrating) fact about his sophomore film, Mallrats.
Despite finding a cult status years later on DVD, the second movie in Smith’s View Askew-niverse absolutely bombed at the box office. “It died,” Smith told Doherty, who agreed and revealed some significant collateral damage.
“So did my film career,” she revealed. “That was it.”
At the time of Mallrats release, Doherty was easily the most famous cast member thanks to Beverly Hills 90210. In fact, Smith shared that her involvement was largely responsible for getting the film greenlit, so it was particularly harrowing to hear that Doherty was the one who suffered the most for its failure.
Via Variety:
When he asked Doherty during the podcast if she really never went on to make another feature, she replied: “No, that was it. People literally thought that I was carrying the movie so therefore it was a box office failure it was completely on me. So there was no film career after that, which was a little brutal.”
“I really thought ‘Mallrats’ was going to kick me into that gear [of] making movies,” she added.
“Boy, I apologize for that,” Smith said after realizing that he basically tanked this poor woman’s movie career. Although, at the time, Universal execs were telling him that he had a hit on his hands.
“Tom Pollock, who was the head of Universal Studios at that point, he’s there and he’s like, ‘I was there for the Animal House test screening and this is that. This movie is going to make $100 million,’” Smith recalled. “And he was off by $98 million.”
(Via Variety)