‘It tanked because it was marketed badly’: A cult favorite fantasy fell short of a sequel because of an equally-beloved bomb 20 years previously

History is littered with wonderful movies that fully deserved the sequels they never ended up getting, but even though it’s been 16 whole years since the whimsical fantasy first landed in theaters, Stardust still stings as one of the many that got away.

It wasn’t exactly a flop, but director Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel could only rustle up $137 million at the box office on a budget reportedly hovering around the $90 million mark, rendering the profit margins too thin for Paramount to take the plunge on a second chapter.

Fortunately, Stardust continues to grow more and more popular with each passing year to have fully established itself as a generation cult favorite, but Vaughn revealed to Collider that one of the major reasons he wasn’t best pleased with the marketing was the studio’s insistence to paint the blockbuster as something it wasn’t, and was never intended to be.

“Listen, Stardust, again was a bittersweet time for me, because when Paramount were releasing it they kept trying to make it look like Lord of the Rings and I’d say “this ain’t Lord of the Rings” and the went “what is it?” and I went “Princess Bride” and they’re like “Princess Bride tanked.” And I was like “yes, it tanked because it was marketed badly and then it became one of the biggest DVDs of all time, so lets just make it lets embrace it.

And they would not listen to me. So then in England, they went do what you want, and we called it the fairytale that won’t behave. And it was my biggest grossing movie at that time. So the economics I have to figure out, there’s now new people at Paramount, but the story was fun.”

Trying to sell Stardust as something else entirely based on a flop that released 20 years previously is Hollywood thinking at its finest, but it’s cruelly ironic that Vaughn’s enduring favorite had done exactly what The Princess Bride did 20 years beforehand; under-perform in theaters, miss out on a follow-up, and then continue cementing its popularity among audiences for years to come.