Long before he was cranking out reliable Oscar-season fare like "Silver Linings Playbook," David O. Russell was a struggling indie writer-director with one squirmy comedy about incest ("Spanking the Monkey") under his belt.
Then, 20 years ago this week, on March 22, 1996, he released the comedy "Flirting With Disaster," starring Ben Stiller, and... crickets. (It would be another three years before "Three Kings" scored Russell his first mainstream hit.)
It's too bad, since "Flirting" is a very funny film, marked by the breakneck pacing that Russell's fans have come to appreciate. But let's face it, not all comedies find their audience right away, and not all worthy comedies even become cult favorites later. Here are seven outrageously funny films worthy of rediscovery now.
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Then, 20 years ago this week, on March 22, 1996, he released the comedy "Flirting With Disaster," starring Ben Stiller, and... crickets. (It would be another three years before "Three Kings" scored Russell his first mainstream hit.)
It's too bad, since "Flirting" is a very funny film, marked by the breakneck pacing that Russell's fans have come to appreciate. But let's face it, not all comedies find their audience right away, and not all worthy comedies even become cult favorites later. Here are seven outrageously funny films worthy of rediscovery now.
Have you seen some of the 
She may not have a huge part in the film, but DC fans have been waiting 75 years to see her on the big screen. According to a 
According to the same survey, 60 percent of those polled were fans of 
Love him or hate him (and there are many in both camps), Snyder deserves credit as a creator of eye-popping visuals that really do look like frames from a comic book brought to life. His movies are among the few that do benefit from being seen in enhanced format. It's no wonder that a full 40 percent of this weekend's "BvS" grosses came from 3D screenings, and a healthy 10.6 percent came from IMAX showings. Those ticket surcharges helped the supercharged opening.
It's late March, so there's really nothing out there, not even "Deadpool" or "Zootopia," that offered a real obstacle to the "BvS" steamroller. The only other wide-release movie this week was the romantic comedy "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2," which actually did better than expected with it estimated $18.1 million premiere. Of course, it's audience was 76 percent female, while "BvS" viewers were mostly guys (62 percent). So it's not like Warner Bros. had to worry about Universal's rom-com stealing much of its action audience.
As Marvel fans know, it's sometimes hard to follow all the action in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies if you haven't been paying attention since the beginning. DC fans know that, if they want to keep up with the DC movies that will spring from this one -- there are at least 10 of them on the drawing board set for release over the next five years, including this summer's "
But even if you're not interested in coming up with your own fan theories or spotting references that may not pay off until, say, the release of the "Cyborg" movie in 2020, you still wanted to see "Batman v Superman" just out of Fear of Missing Out. Thanks to months (years?) of hype, it's become part of the national conversation. (International, even, since the film has grossed an estimated $254 million abroad.) The terrible reviews have only added to that conversation. It can't really be as bad as they say, can it? You went out of curiosity, or because you assumed the critics were just being pointy-headed elitists, or because, even if you thought they might be right, you still had to share the experience. (In fact, the film earned a blah B at CinemaScore, suggesting that word-of-mouth among viewers isn't much more enthusiastic than the reviews.) It's a conversation that's not going to die down any time soon, especially because of the film's controversial ending that's sure to divide even die-hard DC Comics readers who might have seen it coming.
Spare a moment's pity for Batman and Superman.
Did the criticism matter after all?
Does the second-week drop mean the movie's a flop?
Could there be another factor behind this weekend's precipitous plunge? 
So, what are the takeaways?
When "
1. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were still busy investigating Watergate when Robert Redford first called them to ask about buying the movie rights to their story. The suspicious scribes dismissed the actor's call because they assumed they were being pranked by a staffer on Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP).
3. Indeed, the producers went to extreme lengths to make the movie feel authentic. The Post wouldn't allow the production to film in its newsroom, which would have been disruptive, so the filmmakers spent $450,000 recreating the newsroom in a Hollywood soundstage. Art directors visited the real newsroom and took photos, measurements, and even a brick from the lobby. They replicated out-of-date DC phone books and bought desks from the same supplier the Post used. They even got Post reporters to send them boxes of their own trash, to make the fake newsroom look realistically messy.
5. The identity of Deep Throat, the key informant named after the then-popular porn movie, remained a secret known only to Woodward, Bernstein, and Post editor Ben Bradlee. (They kept the secret for 33 years, until former FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt outed himself in 2005.) Woodward did help the filmmakers cast 
7. The movie is so spare and documentary-like that David Shire's musical score doesn't kick in until about 28 minutes into the film.
9. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture (which it lost to "
Forget Wonder Woman or "
Most of McCarthy's hits, including "
There's already a comedy out there that appeals to older women. In fact, "Boss" studio Universal released it just two weeks ago -- "
New entries this weekend proved to be non-starts. With its first-person-shooter-POV gimmick and its clever online marketing campaign aimed at gamers, "Hardcore Henry" had been expected to open between $8 and $12 million, but mixed reviews and weak word-of-mouth (it also earned a C+ at CinemaScore) led to a fifth place debut with just an estimated $5.1 million.
Disney's latest live-action update of one of its classic animated features is "
The 
The generally-lighthearted 1967 cartoon wasn't especially faithful to the source material. Favreau has said his film delves deeper into the Kipling stories, which means the animals are more savage and the danger to Mowgli is greater. Elba's tiger Shere Khan is reportedly one of the scariest screen villains since -- well, Elba's warlord in "
Favreau decided that the cartoon, populated almost exclusively by male characters, needed more feminine presences. So Kaa the Python got a sex change; she's voiced by 
Well, except for the whole talking thing. But at least Baloo (
Darker tone aside, Favreau made sure to keep some of the cartoon's comic-relief moments, as is apparent by the casting of Murray and Walken. (The late 
Hard to believe it's been 15 years since "
1. Helen Fielding's worldwide bestseller started out as a series of columns in Britain's Independent newspaper that loosely fictionalized the romantic misadventures of Fielding and her thirtysomething pals. Fielding acknowledged that she lifted her storyline from "Pride and Prejudice." "Jane Austen's plots are very good and have been market researched over a number of centuries so I decided simply to steal one of them," Fielding joked. "I thought she wouldn't mind, and anyway, she's dead."
4. Zellweger finally won Maguire over, convincing her that her salty, Texas-bred sense of humor helped her empathize with the earthy Bridget. But when her casting was announced, many Brits were outraged over the idea of an American playing such a quintessentially English character. To learn Bridget's British accent, Zellweger enlisted Barbara Berkery, the dialect coach who had guided 
6. The willowy actress also had to pull a "
8. At the time he was cast as cad Daniel Cleaver, Hugh Grant was known for stammering nice-guy roles in such Curtis comedies as "Four Weddings" and "
It's been five years since the release of "
1. "Scream" was originally a screenplay by 
3. Horror master 
5. The menacing phone voice of Ghostface in all the movies belongs to Roger L. Jackson, who also voices the villainous chimp Mojo Jojo on "
7. With the success of "Scream," the sequel was rushed into production, shooting in July 1997 for a release date that December. The haste led to a leak of the script, forcing Williamson to rewrite on set and change the identity of the killers.
9. Cox and 
11. Williamson proposed a second trilogy in 2008, but only got as far as "Scream 4." (Blame that film's less-than-expected box office for why the fifth and sixth films never materialized.) Weinstein instead decided to launch the MTV series in June 2015. Craven's death in August 2015 probably puts the kibosh on any more "Scream" movies.
13. The "Scream 4" filmmakers initially offered 
15. The Ghostface mask was designed by retailer Fun World in 1991, inspired (aptly) by Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream." It was also inspired by a figure from Gerald Scarfe's artwork from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" album and some ghost figures in an old Betty Boop cartoon.
By now, Disney has mastered the art of turning its beloved animated classics into live-action reboots. But there's more than brand recognition at work here. Disney's marketers -- and director 
What were they thinking? That's the question you have to ask Universal and the makers of "
How do you tell a Snow White story without Snow White? Granted, the whole fairytale-backstory thing has worked elsewhere, as in "
Everyone loves 
With the notable exception of costume designer Colleen Atwood's extravagant gowns, a lot of "Winter's War" seems slapdash and hastily cobbled together, according to critics. The film amassed a mere 17 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes (woof!). During production, the film not only lost Stewart and Sanders, but also A-list screenwriters 
Stateside, however, it's likely to limp along for another week until it (and everything else) gets clobbered by another "War" movie: Marvel's "
Twenty years ago this week, four teenage girls dabbled in magic powers and unleashed forces more powerful than they could have imagined. We're not just talking about the plot of "
1. Star 
3. 
5. 
7. The knife fight between Tunney and Balk won the MTV Movie Award for Best Fight, beating such experienced big-screen fighters as Jackie Chan (in "Police Story 4") and Jim Brown (in "Mars Attacks").
10. A year ago, 
Many box office analysts predicted that "
This column has 
"Keanu," the R-rated comedy from sketch duo Key and Peele, did get positive-ish reviews (75 percent at Rotten Tomatoes) and just-okay word-of-mouth (a B CinemaScore), but it had to compete against the still-strong "
In many ways, the box office is in a holding pattern until Disney and Marvel's "
Ho-hum, another first weekend of the 
Or, as Hollis put it on Sunday, "You've gotta make a really great movie." The MCU movies have been fairly consistent in quality, a status Hollis credits largely to Feige, though Feige's willingness to hire inventive filmmakers (such as 
Certainly, Marvel fans come to these films to see familiar faces, but they're also excited about new ones. Said Hollis, "Yes, you have to have movies that feature familiar characters, but you also have to keep this universe fresh by introducing new characters." He was particularly pleased with the eagerly-anticipated introduction in "Civil War" of 
Hollis said he was aware that critics -- and many fans -- may be getting tired of a multiplex blockbuster environment defined almost entirely by spandex-clad comic-book heroes and villains. "We're inoculated against superhero fatigue," he said, "by making movies that individually have a genre that's outside the superhero movie." For instance, he noted, the last "Captain America" installment ("The Winter Solder") was more of "an espionage film." "
Released 20 years ago this week (on May 10, 1996), "
1. The "Twister" screenplay is credited to "
3. 
5. Tensions flared between de Bont and cinematographer 
7. Much of the film was shot in Wakita, Oklahoma, where producers purchased and then leveled eight blocks of existing houses, as well as flattening 30 homes built for the shoot. According to the 
9. "Twister" was nominated for two Oscars, for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound. It was also nominated for two Razzies, including Worst Supporting Actress (for Gertz, pictured). The Crichtons won the Razzie for Worst Written Film Grossing Over $100 Million.
You can pinpoint the moment almost precisely when "
1. "Bridesmaids" came about because of Wiig's cameo as a hostile TV producer in Apatow's "
4. Future "
6. Early drafts of the script featured a bachelorette party sequence in Las Vegas, but just three weeks before shooting, producer Apatow nixed the scene, complaining that there had been too many recent movies (notably, "
9. At the 2012 Oscars, "Bridesmaids" received two nominations, for Best Original Screenplay and for Best Supporting Actress, for McCarthy.