Big budget war epics have always been capable of bringing in big bucks at the box office, with the likes of Dunkirk, Saving Private Ryan, 1917, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, American Sniper, and plenty more turning a tidy profit in theaters. Unfortunately, audiences opted to complete ignore 2005’s The Great Raid to embarrassing effect.
Coming armed with a hefty price tag of $80 million, director Jon Dahl’s inspirational true-life tale tanked spectacularly, going down as one of the biggest flops in history when measuring the production costs against the grosses. All told, The Great Raid could only recoup 12 percent of its mammoth costs from multiplexes, topping out with a dire $10.8 million global haul.
Those who did get around to watching the film seemed to enjoy it a great deal more than critics, though, with the daring rescue story’s weak 38 percent Rotten Tomatoes score being comfortably dwarfed by a stellar 70 percent user rating from over 10,000 votes. To top it all off, Netflix subscribers have opted to revisit the colossal catastrophe en masse.
Per FlixPatrol, the tale of an elite battalion traveling 30 miles behind enemy lines to liberate in excess of 500 American prisoners of war from a Japanese camp in the Philippines towards the tail end of World War II has become a Top 10 success story in multiple countries, and a fixture of the platform’s global charts over the course of the last several days.
Of course, it’s come almost two decades too late to matter, but at least people have actually seen The Great Raid at long last.
Published: Sep 9, 2022 11:31 am