idea ·The Craft (1996)

The Craft got better as it got older

Mixed reviews, a surprise hit, then three decades of reappraisal that inverted which half of the film people take seriously.

format
formula
atomic
reception
commerce

The numbers first. Made for about US$15 million, opened to US$6.7 million and finished on US$55.6 million worldwide — a hit on reviews that were, at best, split. It holds a Saturn nomination for Balk and an MTV Movie Award for best fight.

Ebert — The Craft review (1996) gave it two stars and located the failure precisely:

The movie's failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and special effects.

What changed. Nothing in the film. The reappraisal is a reweighting: the first hour — friendship, power, four girls who are each specifically unhappy — is now the part that gets taken seriously, and the moralising second half is read as the studio flinching. Nancy, the 1996 cautionary example, is now routinely the sympathetic centre (The Craft — Nancy's turn).

Why keep this as a note. It is the clearest case here of a text staying still while its Values context moves, and a caution about treating any single review — including a good one — as the meaning of a film. Compare Taxi Driver — the shoot-out, where the gap opened in the opposite direction: the director's intended reading lost to the audience's on opening night, and never recovered it.

See Commerce and Format.

Go on, then

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idea In every city there's one man Columbia sold Taxi Driver on loneliness, not violence. Scorsese expected audiences to reject the film outright.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
context The Craft turns on its own coven The first hour is about four girls getting power. The second is about taking it back from three of them. The film never reconciles the two.
idea Corman offered to make it Black Roger Corman would fund Mean Streets for $150,000 if every character were Black. Scorsese nearly said yes, then couldn't see them in church.