Director Quentin Tarantino explains why he believes Grindhouse bombed so badly at the box office. Released as a true double-feature containing Planet Terror from Robert Rodriguez and Death Proof by Tarantino, Grindhouse was an attempt at recapturing the experience of watching exploitation movies in the 1970s, complete with fake trailers, commercials, and the look of degraded film quality. The gimmick, however, didn't pay off. Grindhouse was a total disaster at the box office, originally only grossing a little over $25 million worldwide before picking up an additional $42 million when the two features were split up for international markets.
Grindhouse's first film, Planet Terror, is a zombie movie about group who is trying to survive the apocalypse while also feuding with a mysterious military outfit. It stars Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin, and Bruce Willis. Death Proof, the second feature, is about a serial killer stuntman who kills young women with his stunt car, and the group off women he encounters who fight back. It stars Kurt Russel, Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Along with the films, Grindhouse included several fake trailers, two of which went on to become actual movies - Machete starring Danny Trejo and Hobo With a Shotgun starring Rutger Hauer.
In an interview with Empire Magazine, Tarantino offers his explanation for why he believes Grindhouse performed as poorly as it did at the box office, citing the biggest hurdle as being audience's unfamiliarity with the kind of movie-going experience Rodriquez and he were trying to recreate.
With Grindhouse, I think me and Robert just felt that people had a little more of a concept of the history of double features and exploitation movies. No, they didn’t. At all. They had no idea what the fuck they were watching. It meant nothing to them, alright, what we were doing. So that was a case of being a little too cool for school.
Previously, Rodriguez shared that he believed Grindhouse bombed for an entirely different reason, explaining that its poor box office performance came a result of the movie being purposefully "buried" by Harvey Weinstein in retaliation for his casting Rose McGowan. And while that's certainly a possibility (and honestly sounds likely), it would be pretty hard to prove at this point.
Really, though, it's just as likely that Tarantino is right and moviegoers simply didn't get what Rodruiguez and he were going for with Grindhouse. At over three hours long, sitting through a screening of Grindhouse could be a real test of endurance, and especially if viewers only ended up enjoying one of its two features. As aficionados of schlocky horror of the 1970s, Rodriguez and Tarantino did all they could to the replicate the experience of watching those kinds of movies in old rundown theaters, but as Tarantino correctly observes, there just wasn't an audience for it.
Source: Empire