Good movies that unexplainably bombed hard

how about the more modern "The Nice Guys"

My thanks for your comments, and my complete agreement with your words.

They create nostalgia for me too, and I also have no connection with the era except through popular culture, i.e., books and movies (and, needless to say, relatives who lived through it).

It may be too simplistic to romanticize any era (everyone knows nothing was always lovey-dovey, hunky-dory in any time, especially in the Depression-frought '30s and war-bound '40s), but it is equally simplistic, and specious, to de-romanticize any era, and too many films just seem to rejoice in doing so. (Pleasantville, a terrible, pretentious picture that I find wildly overrated, is a prime example.) It is for that reason that I find movies like Indy, The Rocketeer, Sky Captain, and last year's Allied to be such a breath of fresh air.

We moderns tend to be chronological snobs, looking down our noses at anyone base enough to have been born in a different time. Movies like these not only remind us that people are all people, and that in fact some the "bad old days" might in fact have been "good" or at least "better," but also that the movies have an innate magic to them missing from modern-day popcorn flicks. We enter a crowded theater as we would a temple to some arcane god, and we watch shadows dance on the screen and tell us stories that excite our wildest imagination and give life to our greatest dreams. It makes us certain that magic and mystery have not left the world even yet and that, God willing, they never will.

I don't think it is really bad, just completely forgettable and dull.