Photo: "Love Jones," movie
The critics loved “Love Jones” but the box office didn’t.
“I was optimistic because we had done well at Sundance, and I had tried to make the film accessible to as much of a mass audience as it was going to be. But we never quite cracked its marketing, and it didn’t really perform at the box office, even though the soundtrack was a hit,” Witcher told The New York Times.
“But my recollection is that the critical response was good. Then it didn’t do a tremendous amount of business, which was surprising. They [initially] put the movie out during the spring, and the soundtrack record became a hit. So, between the studio and the record company, they scratched some money together and decided to do a re-release. They put it back out that summer, I believe, on four hundred screens. It still didn’t perform. I couldn’t figure out why — nobody could figure out why. I just moved on. But even from the beginning, people were coming up to me on the street and would say positive things. That continued on for years, to this day. So, I never got the sense that the audience didn’t like the movie. It had its acolytes,” he told the Village Voice.
The lack of a mass audience appeal didn’t fare well for Witcher’s future film prospects, and he knew it, but still he didn’t cave to Hollywood’s expectation of a Black filmmaker.
“Then I made maybe a mistake because instead of retrenching and trying to do something similar, I tried to push further. I walk into a room — I don’t feel any sort of inferiority whatsoever. But they look at the numbers and go, ‘Who is this guy with this attitude with these numbers? Your movie made $12 million. Why are you even in my office today?'” said Witcher, admitting to attending these meetings with an “attitude.”
“I conducted myself like a Hollywood movie director, which is what I was at that point. But I didn’t understand that it wasn’t necessarily about the creative achievement of the film or even whether you win any trophies for it. It’s about numbers,” he told The New York Times.
