40 Years Later, Hollywood Still Hasn’t Learned the Right Lesson from ‘Highlander’
The 1986 film Highlander initially failed both commercially and critically, earning only $12.8 million against a $19 million budget. Critics were harsh, with Roger Ebert dismissing it as “completely silly and very boring,” while Gene Siskel called it “one of the lousiest films I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Despite this disastrous start, Highlander found an audience through VHS releases and developed into a cult classic, eventually spawning a franchise that included films and television series. However, according to the article’s premise, this critical reappraisal misses the mark. The film isn’t an underrated gem overlooked by snobbish critics—it’s genuinely a bad, self-important movie that took itself far too seriously for its campy premise.
With a Henry Cavill-led reboot in development, the article suggests Hollywood is poised to repeat the same mistakes that plagued the original. Rather than learning from Highlander’s unintentional failures, the industry continues to treat the property with the same heavy-handed seriousness that made the original problematic, missing the opportunity to either make a genuinely good film or embrace the fun the material could offer.