famously never won an Oscar, for instance, just as actor Samuel L. Jackson has never won one despite starring in seemingly every big movie ever. One particularly fun example of this phenomenon came with Kurt Russell’s 1984 movie “Swing Shift,” a box office bomb that grossed $6.6 million on a $15 million budget.
Why did it bomb? The general consensus was that the movie failed to live up to its promising premise. The movie was about the labor shortage during WWII, where women found unexpected power in the workforce before being pushed back into traditional roles the moment the war was over. The movie captured the feeling of the time period well and featured a few hard-hitting moments, but it didn’t nail it in the way that “A League of Their Own” would a decade later. “The subject matter of ‘Swing Shift’ is so potentially rich, you hate to see it squandered this way,” wrote Sheila Benson of the LA Times.
Critics pointed to the behind-the-scenes conflict affecting the story; not only was the script rewritten multiple times, but Warner Bros. forced 30 minutes worth of reshoots onto the film against director Jonathon Demme’s wishes. The conflicting visions behind the film bled into the movie itself, as multiple critics seemed to notice. “It’s a wisp of a movie, with vague aspirations to be touching, and I got the impression that there had never been a very strong script,” wrote Pauline Kael for The New Yorker. “There are no high spots, no exciting moments. The picture just goes popping from one recessive, undeveloped scene to the next.”
