Reception
Three previews went well. Beatty described one in Toronto as the best he'd ever had, and he and the studio considered striking more prints. Those discussions ended after the opening weekend, May 22, 1987. Ishtar, on more than a thousand screens across the country, took in $4.2 million ($8.59 million in contemporary dollars) in receipts, winning the weekend and #1 at the box office. But it beat The Gate, a low-budget horror film with no stars, by only $100,000. Ultimately it grossed only $14.3 million in North American box office receipts against its $55 million budget.
Negative buzz about Ishtar and its outrageous budget was widespread in the press long before the film ever reached theaters, despite three successful previews. In an interview with Elaine May, Mike Nichols described the bomb as "the prime example that I know of in Hollywood of studio suicide", implying that Puttnam sandbagged the project by leaking negative anecdotes to the media because of his grudges against Beatty and Hoffman.
Before release, market research led Columbia to believe the film would fail. Its head of marketing, Peter Sealey advised the studio to minimize its losses by cutting the film's advertising budget. Instead, Columbia spent even more to promote the film, afraid of alienating Beatty and Hoffman. "Ego trumps logic in Hollywood," said Sealey.
Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum surmised that the media was eager to torpedo Ishtar in retaliation for instances of Beatty's perceived "high-handed way with members of the press". The film had been completely closed to the media, with no reporters at all permitted on set during production, a restriction greater than Beatty's previous productions.
The film was nominated for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay in the 1987 Golden Raspberry Awards, winning one for Worst Director. The movie has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ishtar has since become synonymous with "box office flop".
However, not all critics were hostile. Vincent Canby of The New York Times listed it as a runner up to his top films of 1987.
Warren Beatty defended the film, and despite all the severe trouble and misery he went through making it, is quoted as saying, "There was almost no review that didn't in the first paragraph deal with the cost of the movie. That was an eye-opener – about the business, and the relationship of the entertainment press to business. Ishtar is a very good, not very big, comedy, made by a brilliant woman. And I think it's funny." Dustin Hoffman also defended the film, stating that he would "do it again in a second."
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