IGetSoEmojinal — 9 years ago(August 23, 2016 12:43 AM)

Halloween was a huge hit and he had a few other films that broke even or at least came close to breaking even (more or less doubling the budget) but for the most part this guy made nothing but box office bombs. The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape from L.A., Ghosts of Mars, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Village of the Damned and others were not successful theatrical releases at all and lost millions for the studios. His others like The Fog, Christine, Prince of Darkness and They Live may have surpassed their budgets at the box office but were hardly big hits. Most probably did well on home video and cable since most were made in the 80s and 90s but one could say the same thing for most other movies made during that time.
Considering that, I'm surprised he had 20 years worth of chances making big budget, wide release films after having made so many unsuccessful ones. He made just two films that did well enough to be considere5b4d major box office hits: Halloween in 1978 and Escape from New York in 1982, yet kept going for 20 years after that. By comparison, Tobe Hooper had a major hit with Poltergeist, which grossed more than anything Carpenter ever made, but had the plug pulled on any chance of a Hollywood career just a few years later after Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars flopped. Wes Craven had many chances to make studio films, but at least that can be justified since he made at least one major hit each decade from the 70s all the way up to the 2000s. And George Romero never got as much money as any of the above to make movies despite having hits across three decades himself. I guess what I am saying is that Carpenter's career trajectory kind of baffles me. Maybe his greatest actual talent was schmoozing with the big wigs and convincing them to let him keep directing despite his films consistently bombing.