When a movie bombs hard enough, it earns a rather notorious place in the history books. As time goes
on, the world's biggest cinematic flops come to be regarded as legends — or, at the very least,
they carry some serious name recognition. After all, who doesn't remember the ridiculously
expensive failure that was Waterworld? What about Gigli, the Ben Affleck/Jennifer
Lopez gangster flick that was so bad it got yanked out of theaters in just three weeks?
These films, though, are high profile failures. While they certainly lost the studios some major
dough, they didn't set any records for being the lowest grossing movie of all-time. Instead,
that dubious distinction goes to a movie that — fittingly enough — you've probably never heard of,
even though it was a thriller that starred two popular actors,
in Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore.
Zyzzyx Road opened in U.S. theaters in February of 2006. Between a weird title that Microsoft
Word underlines in red, a budget of $1.2 million, and a bizarre release strategy,
the film earned a total gross lower than your average grocery trip. Here's why.
First off, about the title — no, it's not a typo, even though Southwest locals will
correctly tell you that it looks an awful lot like Zzyzx, which is a real place in California.
As for some background on the film itself, since, given the box office gross, you never saw it:
it stars Leo Grillo as an accountant named Grant who goes to Vegas and
gets involved with a woman named Marissa, played by Katherine Heigl.
They murder her ex-boyfriend, Joey, played by Tom Sizemore, and cart his corpse off to
the desert — only to find out he's still alive. Zyzzyx Road was written, produced,
and directed by John Penney, and was something of a passion project. It made $30 in theaters.
Yes, you heard right. During its entire theatrical run, only six people paid money to see the film.
"This movie was a total disappointment. No thought went into it. No effort went into it."
As insane as that sounds, hold your laughter. Because this abysmal profit,
while it might technically be the lowest gross ever,
comes with a big asterisk — namely, that nobody was supposed to buy tickets for that
particular run of Zyzzyx Road in the first place. As explained by Entertainment Weekly,
the marketing plan was to pursue international sales first, then do a domestic release later on.
However, the name actors had accepted a lower pay rate for the sake of the production,
and the strict rules of the Screen Actor's Guild required that, for them to do so, there needed
to be a domestic release in theaters first. The solution? The production rented a single
theater in Texas, and showed the movie only once a day for six days straight. Nobody was supposed
to know. Once the media found out, though, there was no stuffing the cat back in the bag.
John Penney was heartbroken when the mocking headlines emerged. He told Entertainment Weekly:
"I was mortified. [...] this movie is like my baby, and it's being dragged around in
the street with people poking sticks in it. It was brutal. It was ugly. I was reeling."
Embarrassing as the scenario may seem, though, the notoriety helped bring attention to the film. And,
regardless, everyone who understands the business knows that the fact that it only made 30 bucks
at the box office is really not that important. Because once the film started putting out DVDs,
the international market alone netted $368,000 in 23 countries.
Meanwhile, though, these media shenanigans may have caused another
film's reputation to get hit even harder than Zyzzyx Road. In February of 2006,
the exact same time in history where Zyzzyx Road set a new low point in ticket sales,
another thriller movie was released, titled Zzyzx. What are the odds, right?
Zzyzx also involves murder in the Southwest U.S. desert. That said,
between the similar plotlines and the similar titles,
Zzyzx often gets confused with Zyzzyx Road to this day. Probably for the sake of making space from
the more well-known release, some subsequent releases of Zzyxz have been retitled Burned.
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