Documentary Replaces the Need to Watch Failed Films

"Boorman and the Devil," the new documentary about John Boorman's catastrophic 1977 sequel, has arrived at the exact moment when theatrical distribution of behind-the-scenes retrospectives feels like earned vindication.

The film itself — Exorcist II, which cost $14 million and returned $30 million in a year when that gap meant genuine commercial failure — now gets reframed through the lens of directorial intention, studio sabotage. The brilliant madness of a filmmaker operating beyond his budget's control. The documentary is genuinely compelling, but the problem is not its quality. It's what quality buys you.

This redemptive arc, where a notorious failure gets excavated, contextualized, and suddenly viewed as misunderstood ambition, has a direct precedent. Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" followed an identical path starting in 1981. It lost United Artists roughly $40 million, was almost universally despised, then came the reconstructions and criterion releases that placed Cimino's aesthetic vision in conversation with studio interference. Today, "Heaven's Gate" occupies a strange cultural position where box-office annihilation functions as evidence of artistic integrity rather than aesthetic failure.

What matters is structural. Both films get their redemption by shifting focus from what's on screen to what happened off it. The narrative becomes about financing, studio notes, a director's vision constrained by commercial pressure. This is a seductive story because it flatters the audience. You are not watching a film that doesn't work. You are watching evidence of a visionary defeated by the machinery that surrounds him. The failure itself becomes secondary to the struggle that produced it.

You get the benefit of feeling like you understand the film's "real" value without enduring its problems.

But there is a version of this story where the documentary does not rehabilitate the film at all. It simply replaces the need to sit through it. When audiences can access the intellectual scaffolding that makes failure intelligible, the behind-the-scenes chaos and artistic ambition and studio greed, the actual experience of watching a work that doesn't function becomes optional. You get the benefit of feeling like you understand the film's "real" value without enduring its problems. For any creative person working in environments where resources are finite and stakeholders disagree, the seduction is complete. What gets obscured is whether the work itself. Its actual shape, its narrative coherence, its ability to move an audience. Might matter more than the story of how it came to be broken.