BABE: PIG IN THE CITY — George Miller makes one for the grownups

The first BABE was a family-friendly megahit. So for the sequel, why did director George Miller thrust his sweet porcine hero into a family-unfriendly nightmare?  Host Rico Gagliano takes a trot down the mean streets of BABE: PIG IN THE CITY, telling the story of its rise and box-office fall with the help of guests including Farmer Hoggett himself, James Cromwell (SUCCESSION), and voice-of-Babe E.G. Daily (PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE).

The latest season of The MUBI Podcast – BOX OFFICE POISON — dives into six visionary films... that were also notorious flops. Inspired by the new book of the same name by Tim Robey, film critic for The Telegraph, every episode is a wild ride through a great movie's rise, and fall, and rise.

The Short Films Big Names collection is now streaming on MUBI. To watch some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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This episode includes adult language and spoilers. Let me take you back to summer 1995, when a future film critic named Tim Robey was just a movie obsessed teenager on vacation from his native London, and about to sit down to watch a movie at a mall multiplex in Los Angeles. That summer was at the movies was the summer of <i>Apollo 13, Braveheart</i>.<i>While You Were Sleeping</i>, all these... these were big hits. This is when <i>Babe</i> came out.<i>Babe</i> was the one that no one saw coming. Based on a kid's book,<i>Babe</i> was the story of a sweet little talking piglet, who charms a simple rural farmer, along with every animal in his barnyard, and then blows the locals' minds by becoming a prize-winning sheep herder. It was the debut movie from a little known Australian director named Chris Noonan. It seemed like it was just for kids and yet... Already, there was buzz around it. The reviews had been so good, and I remember going to see it in... L.A., in Century City with my brothers, and we kind of just rocked up. You know, five minutes before it was starting, it was almost completely sold out already, and the only seats we could get were at the very end of the front row. And it was quite a cramped screen where the sightlines were pretty terrible there. So I, essentially we had this tiny sliver of a view of <i>Babe</i>. Still completely delighted with it. I mean, just a film that almost nobody had a bad word for.<i>Baa-ram-ewe!</i><i>Baa-ram-ewe, to your breed, your fleece, your clan,</i><i>be true. Sheep be true.</i><i>- Baa-ram-ewe!- "Ewe", what did you say?</i> You could understand why it was already becoming such, a kind of, word of mouth hit, even just a week or two into its run. But it did. It kind of caught Hollywood off guard. It became this phenomenon and ended up becoming a Best Picture nominee, which is almost unheard of for a family film.<i>That'll do, Pig.</i><i>That'll do.</i> But then the contrast, three years later to when I saw <i>Babe: Pig in the City</i>, the sequel, was very extreme. Yeah, in 1998, a way more celebrated director made the much anticipated follow up to this gigantic, crowd pleasing hit, and it wound up literally driving audiences out of theaters. Which led Tim to wonder,"how the hell did that happen?" I am Rico Gagliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season seven. We're calling it <i>Box Office Poison</i>, and it is based on the new book of the same name from Tim Robey, who grew up to be a film critic for London's Daily Telegraph. Every episode, we're telling the tortured tale of a very good movie that did very bad box office. And today is a perfect example, George Miller's big budget spectacular -<i>Babe: Pig in the City</i>. Last year, Variety magazine named it one of the best sequels of all time. But back in '98, that was definitely not the audience consensus. So they did a screening for these executives and their children, and the children were traumatized. That's the great actor James Cromwell. He was in HBO's <i>Succession</i> and played Babe's owner, Farmer Hoggett, in both the original and the sequel. And he's one of a bunch of folks I spoke to about how Miller took a family franchise, about a good hearted pig and roasted it on a spit. I couldn't really comprehend how dark it was going to be. I don't even think I really got it until I watched the movie. To me, this is the tale of an artist who never tells the same story twice, and an industry that just figured he would. So get ready for a trot on the wild side down the mean streets

of <i>Babe: 4:05

Pig in the City</i>. To understand how this sequel went bust, first, I think you got to understand how the original blew up. So I'm going to start the story back in the mid-1980s, several thousand feet above India. George Miller had just wrapped up <i>Beyond Thunderdome</i>, the third installment of his post-apocalyptic <i>Mad Max</i> franchise, and on a long flight to London, I guess he felt like taking in some lighter fare. And in the middle of the night.<i>I turned on the audio and was listening to a children's program in which a woman</i><i>was reviewing children's books.</i> That's him from an interview he did years later.<i>And she started to review this book about a pig that became world champion sheepdog,</i><i>and she started to laugh during the review and she laughed in such a way</i><i>I thought this must be very special.</i> The book was called 'The Sheep-Pig' by British kids author Dick King-Smith. Miller bought a copy the second he landed and, according to James Cromwell, instantly wanted to make it a movie. George had read this one of Dick King-Smith's books and read it to his daughter, and really loved it, but didn't have the expertise to do the CGI as expressively as he wanted it to be. Yeah, to get across the book's droll vibe, Miller imagined a movie where the animals seemed like they were really talking to each other, expressing subtle emotions. But he learned that to pull that off with 1980s technology would cost like 100 million bucks. So he waited for, I don't know, I think 10 or 11 years, actually. And the wait paid off. By the time cameras finally started rolling circa 1994, in Miller's homeland of Australia, farmer Hoggett's barnyard came to life. In the movie, now titled just <i>Babe</i> after its hero, deployed every effects trick available trained live animals, life-like animatronics, stand ins and CGI to make the creature's lips move. It was so good that we would all go to dailies, the crews and everybody else would go to dailies. The Australians who loved to bet on anything would bet on which of the animals were real, and which ones were animatronic, because you literally could not tell. Only at the end of the take when they yelled "Cut!" the ones that were mechanized, of course their heads just drooped. And that way you knew that you won. This still didn't come cheap at a budget of over 30 million bucks.<i>Babe</i> was one of the most expensive Australian movies ever. But between the effects and the charming tale, everyone figured they had a hit on their hands. Except, apparently the film's distributor, Universal Pictures. The studio... Oh man, the studio so did not want this picture to succeed. It was unbelievable. There was a press junket to Houston, to the Space Center for a screening of <i>Apollo</i> or whatever the--- <i>Apollo 13</i>.- <i>Apollo 13</i>. And they loved it all. You know, they're feted, they're taken to the best restaurants. And when they got in the bus to go to the airport,

the representative from Universal said: 7:19

"Listen, we we got this little, oh, it's this kid's film about a pig." And I heard that they all went,"Oh, no, oh, we have to watch this?" Except guess what? The critics loved it. Despite which Cromwell says the studio couldn't imagine giving the movie a big prime time red carpet premiere. So they opened it in a little theater, in Santa Monica, in the middle of the day. I think it was Sunday with an invited audience of normal people, and they're watching the story. And then all of a sudden the pig makes a joke, and I heard adults start to laugh, and then recognized they were now entranced by this little pig. And I thought,"Oh, Jesus, I got something here." The movie made over 120 million bucks, and ended up on dozens of best of the year lists, won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy, and made such a case for animal dignity, it literally turned people vegetarian. Cromwell went from vegetarian to vegan. People loved the film, loved it, loved it. One person said,"I'll never forgive you for that picture." I said, "Oh really? Why?" She said, "Because my daughter, who I love dearly, came to me and said,"I'm not eating any animals ever again and I hold you responsible for this." I said, "Well, give your daughter a big kiss from me." It seemed like the beginning of another obvious George Miller franchise.<i>Babe</i> had caught universal by surprise, but now the studio vowed to happily put all its firepower behind a sequel with the same happy formula. Except, Tim Robey says, what many didn't know at the time was behind the scenes, that formula hadn't made everyone so happy. George Miller obviously was heavily involved in the first <i>Babe</i> as the writer and producer of the film, but he did not direct it. He gave the direction to Chris Noonan and a lot of tension arose from that. Yeah, before <i>Babe</i>, Chris Noonan was best known for helming a bunch of celebrated Australian TV shows, giving him a tender, empathetic touch, which made him an obvious choice for <i>Babe</i>, given the source material. I would say, if you were to try and adapt the book faithfully, you would probably wind up with something in spirit like the first <i>Babe</i>. They're lovely, pastoral, extremely sort of kind hearted books. Chris Noonan wanted to do it that way. But turns out that was only part of the vibe his producer was hoping for. Essentially, Chris Noonan's vision for the film was much cuddlier cozier, kind of safer than what George Miller had intended it to be. Miller really wanted it to be really quite dark, and he kept comparing it to <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>, which is really a very dark movie for 90% of its running time before the kind of redemption at the end.<i>Why do we have to live here in the first place</i><i>and stay around this measly, crummy old town?</i><i>George, what's wrong?</i><i>Wrong? Everything's wrong.</i><i>You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?</i> This is what he envisaged <i>Babe</i> to be like. And on set, he and Chris Noonan clashed really quite a bit. It got so bad, not for me, I had the best time in my life doing that picture. But for Chris-- poor, poor Chris. Every time George saw dailies that didn't match his vision, he would either call up Chris, or he would come in and say, you know, "Why are you doing that?"That doesn't work. It would work better if you did this." Finally, there was a confrontation that came while we were shooting out in the middle of the field, and they excused themselves and went down about 100 yards away. And I saw George just tearing Chris a new asshole. Cromwell says Miller respected Noonan enough to ultimately let his sunnier vision win the day, but... It so hurt Chris, that Chris said,"I'll never work with him again, ever." I will never put myself through this. So when the chance came around to do a sequel, which Chris Noonan didn't want to do, George Miller decided this time I'm going to do it my way. And that is very much what we get in,<i>Babe: Pig in the City</i>. It is the George Miller <i>Babe</i> film, which is fully him from top to bottom, and it is essentially a kind of a Mad Max film with a talking pig.

The script to <i>Babe: 11:29

Pig in the City</i>, written by Miller along with Judy Morris and Mark Lamprell, doesn't waste any time alerting the reader that they're in for a very different kind of ride.<i>Fate turns on a moment, dear ones, and the pig was about to learn the meaning</i><i>of those two cruel words of regret.</i><i>If only.</i> It's about three minutes in, I think? Farmer Hogget falls down the well and breaks nearly every bone in his body. Not only that, it's kind of Babe's fault.<i>If only he hadn't been so careless.</i> And the scene is harrowing. It has this kind of Rube Goldberg business going on with the bucket and the ropes.<i>If only the farmer did not connect with the platform on the way up</i><i>or jam his fingers at the top.</i> Farmer Hoggett is completely in distress. In the original script, he was supposed to die...<i>Boss?</i><i>Boss?</i> But ultimately that idea was nixed. But there are plenty more pitfalls to befall poor Babe as the disabled Farmer Hoggett's farm goes untended. The two sinister bankers come down the path, threatening the farm with foreclosure and all that Esme, Farmer Hoggett's wife, can think to do is to go to the big city with Babe. In the hopes of winning a sheep herding contest at a state fair. But you know that that is never very much explored because their entire plan is scuppered almost the moment they arrive. I mean, even when they're at the airport, there's the strip searching of Esme.<i>Esme Cordelia Hoggett.</i><i>We have reason to believe you may be carrying</i><i>illegal substances on your person.</i><i>And being an officer of the Drug Enforcement Agency</i><i>I am authorized by law to conduct certain procedures.</i><i>Please step into the cubicle and remove your clothes.</i> All of which causes Esme and Babe to miss their connecting flight, and leads to the little piglet getting forced to fend for himself in a back alley boarding house straight out of a David Lynch movie. And there were a lot of animals there who he actually does not know, doesn't understand, and some of them are threatening predators who come after him on the streets. The poor pig is running along these canals, and these vicious dogs who are loose in the city are attacking him, chasing him. The chimps inside the boarding house have kind of a scheme as well. They're not on Babe's side... I can't kind of can't believe how dark it's going when they go to a cancer ward. And Mickey Rooney-- we haven't even mentioned Mickey Rooney as the most terrifying clown you'll ever meet in any film, is trying to entertain the kids in the cancer ward with his chimps, and something is knocked over and everything is set on fire. Animals are screaming and kids are screaming. I mean, it is bleak. It's bleak. It all kind of begs two questions. First one being why? Why would Miller, even in the first movie, want to impose this kind of darkness on Dick King-Smith's bucolic barnyard world? And if you ask me, you can maybe find the answer in Miller's early career as an E.R. doctor.<i>Well, growing up in remote, rural Australia, there was a lot of death by</i><i>auto-side, just people dying on the road.</i> That's him talking to me on my old radio show back in 2016 about how he'd come up with his first vengeful cop-on-wheels <i>Mad Max</i> movie.<i>And then working as a doctor years later in a large city hospital,</i><i>I saw that even more, and somehow that got got to me.</i><i>- Being around road injuries?- Yeah.</i><i>And I thought someone working with that a lot,</i><i>I just wondered what that would do to somebody.</i><i>I thought, what would it be like for a cop?</i> It seems to me, and I think to James Cromwell that being exposed to all that senseless death did something to Miller. A guy trained to save lives, watching people risk their own and others on the regular. George is a doctor and George--<i>Road Warrior</i> is his vision of the relationship of one human being to another human being, and to groups of other human beings, and how we behave mostly like animals and we are necessarily violent. And he'd read no-- he didn't give a shit what happened in the first <i>Babe</i>. The first film was to get them engaged in this world. The second film was-- Yes, but what are the what happens when these creatures with an unprejudiced heart go out into the world? The world eats them.<i>And so, dear ones, the pig and the farmer's wife</i><i>ventured into the larger world.</i> Yeah, just like <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>,<i>Pig in the City</i> has faith in its heroes, but not always in society.<i>What follows is an account of their calamitous adventures,</i><i>and how a kind and steady heart can mend a sorry world.</i><i>Save the farm, Babe. Save the farm, save the farm.</i> It's a grown up fable that Cromwell says was meant by design for a grown up audience.

Which brings me to question number two: 16:26

How did Universal greenlight this script, as a follow up to its cuddly, kid friendly mega-hit? It was a case of them not having read through it properly and seen how dark he was going to push it. I think they always assumed that he was just going to wind up somehow converting it into a really heartwarming fable, much like the first one. He didn't do that. And you have to remember that this film was being shot on the other side of the world at Fox Studios Australia, as it was then called, you know, thousands of miles away from the corporate HQ. And so that was another way in which George Miller managed to kind of get away with doing whatever he wanted to do. And he did. How George Miller spent close to$100 million on a <i>Babe</i> movie, after all, and how it all went up in smoke. Coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We have always got something new for you to discover. And since we're talking about a movie starring a small but mighty cinematic hero... Oh, <i>Babe</i>, I would like to direct you to a collection of small but mighty pieces of cinema that you can watch on MUBI. We are calling the collection'Short Films, Big Names' and you can probably guess what the theme is. It's a slew of shorts from some of the world's greatest directors. We're talking Sofia Coppola, David Cronenberg, Julie Dash, David Lynch and one of my favorites, Andrea Arnold. We've got her Oscar winning short <i>Wasp</i>, which is about an impoverished single mom just trying to have a date. It is both way more suspenseful and ultimately way more hopeful than you would expect. These little movies are a great window into the formation and evolution of these filmmakers. They'll fit nicely into your busy schedule, and they're proof that size doesn't matter. I didn't come up with that logline, but I do love that our programing team did. You can start watching just by subscribing to MUBI at mubi.com. You will find all the info you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, back to it. All right, so like I said earlier,<i>Babe</i> wasn't a cheap movie to make, thanks mainly to all the animals involved. Each had to be trained. Some needed trained doubles. Actually, <i>Babe</i> himself was played by many thespian pigs. They feed the pig as a reward for doing the things that it does, and by three weeks it's put on so much weight that it would to an audience, we know immediately it can't be the same pig. So what they did was they would use the litter and they would train them all. They would use one for three weeks, then they would bring in the next one, then they would bring in the next one. And of course, there were all the animatronic doubles for a barnyard full of animals. So you can imagine what happened to the budget of the sequel, when Miller called for a city full of animals. According to the L.A. Times, there were over 700 animals on this movie. There's cats, there's dogs, there's pigeons, there's mice. They're all brought to the set with all of their handlers and their trainers and so forth. This is a huge cluster of people and creatures. Chimpanzees as well. Chimpanzees. There's the incredible orangutan as well. Thelonious voiced by James Cosmo, who I think is great.<i>You drooling imbeciles.</i><i>As lowly handlers,</i><i>deeply unattractive mud lover is a pig.</i> We actually spent about two years on this project. This incredibly laid back guy is Steve Martin, not the comedian. He is one of Hollywood's top animal trainers. I have an animal compound that we've done animal work for, I hate to admit it, the last 50 years. For <i>Pig in the City</i>, Martin trained all the primates, including Thelonious the orangutan. He says he warned Miller it wouldn't be easy, especially shooting in Australia. He had a lot of questions and I said, well, you know, all these animals take permits and permits these days can be difficult. I mean, I ended up having to fly our vet down there and meet with the government. And the orangs I had here, for instance, they would not let me take them out of the United States. So we had to look around the world for orangs. A search financed by a budget that seemed endless. You know, they gave us an advancement on money to go see if we could find some orangs. So I heard about some down in South America. And so I called Doug Mitchell, he was one of the producers. I said, "Doug, I heard about these." He says, "Steve, I gave you money."You see something? I don't care where it is."Go look at it." I went, "Oay, but I just want to double check with you"before I go and spend your money on flying down to South America." Eventually, they found the winners in Indonesia. Other animals got flown into Sydney from all over the planet, each of which had to be carefully introduced to new surroundings, a new time zone, their human costars and each other. No one knew, for example, whether chimps and pigs were going to be able to get on well which is kind of key to the story, because Babe is trying to befriend this family of chimps in it, and the mice were breeding like mad, on-set. they brought, you know, a dozen or so, and there were more than a hundred within weeks, and they had to somehow stop the mice breeding while this was all going on. Like dealing with actors is never simple, but hundreds of animal actors presented a special set of problems, is what I'm saying. Miller, though, was super willing to roll with it. George would, you know, we had like five different sets going at a time sometimes, and he would come on and he says,"I, you know, I'd like to do this and this"and this with the chimps and the 'rangs." And I'd say, "Well, that's going to take us a few days"because we have to prep them for that." He says, "Well, you just take as long as you need."When you're ready, you tell me." And which I thought was extremely different because, you know, usually it's,"Well, we're going to shoot on Tuesday, so you can have it ready by then?" You know, it's it was never that way, it was always, you know, time was on your side. And if you needed it, you got it. But time, as we know, is money. And there were plenty more expenses. You know, you had so many hundreds of animals being rounded up and brought to these beautifully designed city sets that Universal had paid for. It's it's a kind of set that's very stylized. It's all cities at once, really. In the background you can see Big Ben. You can see the Eiffel Tower, you can see Sydney Opera House... Christ the Redeemer, all crammed into the same skyline, which is a really fun mash up. You can see the influences of films like<i>Blade Runner</i> and <i>Brazil</i> in there as well. There's a kind of dystopian aspect to it and Universal sort of, I think they knew that the film was going to be a lot more expensive than <i>Babe</i>, but I don't think they realized it was going to climb to $90 million three times as expensive. I mean, that is a lot of money for 1998, a lot of money. And as the picture came together, some started realizing the vision it was all paying for, probably wasn't what folks were expecting. Like take the actually pretty incredible scene Tim Robey mentioned earlier, Babe getting chased along, over and sometimes, into a canal by a pack of street dogs led by a fearsome bull terrier. This is one of the best sequences in the film, one of the most well edited and dynamically crafted scenes, with these animals all careening around the canal. It is beautifully and fluidly put together all of that stuff. I mean, it sort of as an action movie, it works remarkably well. But as a kids movie, maybe not. Especially when that terrier ends up dangling from its own leash face down in the canal. It culminated in, of course, the dog almost drowning, the junkyard dog chasing them. James Cromwell saw an early cut of this thanks to a personal source on the visual effects team. My son, he was working on it, so I saw as they were doing the CGI on that sequence, I saw the sequence and I said,"Kids can't see this because it was so realistic." And they said,"Well, that's what they're doing."<i>This is what happens Alan, on the outside.</i><i>It's the times, Nigel.</i> But other players on <i>Pig in the City</i>, told me the movie's extremes weren't always so obvious. Hey, guys. So I'm E. G. Daily. I do voices, I do on-camera acting. And I was the voice of Babe in <i>Babe: Pig in the City</i>. Yeah. E. G. Daily is known for adorable roles like Dottie, Pee-Wee Herman's girlfriend, in <i>Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.</i> She also voiced Tommy Pickles on the cartoon <i>Rugrats</i>, but she was no stranger to George Miller's darker work.<i>I heard...</i><i>I'm sorry. So let's let's try that again.</i> In his medical drama <i>Lorenzo's Oil</i>, she dubbed the wrecked voice of the title character a little boy with a degenerative disease.<i>This morning, I could still understand him.</i> But <i>Pig in the City</i> didn't feel that grim to her. Maybe because she spent a lot of her studio time with Miller, sweating the details. He's very particular, like he really wants to... Every line, it's like, you probably could do it 70 times, 80 times. And he's he's looking for very, very delicate little tiny essences in the line or feeling in the line. So he'll literally have you do it so many different times that sometimes the line, you don't even know what you're saying, it becomes like "Wah wah wah" you know, "Blah blah, blah". And then finally you get a performance that George kind of lures you to. That is really magical. It made for an incredibly subtle performance, but sounds like it didn't make it easy for her to see the big picture. He's so deeply connected to his work that I didn't, I couldn't really comprehend what how dark it was going to be. I don't even think I really got it until I watched the movie. And the same went for the studio. George didn't allow anybody in Hollywood to see his pictures before they opened, but somebody in the upper echelons of Universal came to him and said,"Listen, George, there are a lot of executives who have children"and really would like to watch it."Could you do a special screening?" So they did a screening for these executives and their children, and the children were traumatized. They ran literally ran past me screaming out of the theater. As dark as the version we know today is, that original cut went way darker. For example, the murder of a neighbor in the city scenes. There's an opera loving neighbor across the street from the canal who wants to get all the animals round up and taken away. That character is, was murdered in the original script by the characters were meant to like, the landlady and Esme. Farmer Hoggett's wife killed that character and they shot that. I saw the whole movie, and then I was like: Oh, wow, that's like, it's almost like Felliniesque. Or yeah, that was heavier than the first one by far. So they said to George, you got to cut this film. This is just we're I think it's a week before we open at Grauman's or wherever the hell they were going to do this thing. All the invitations were out. Everybody was expecting it. And George said, I can't cut 20 minutes out of the film without rebalancing the-- I have to rebalance the entire film. And they said, well, we must postpone. We can't we can't show this film. And essentially the story from then until the moment it's released is one of them trying to deny all of this panic. And the cover story, I feel it was probably a cover story that they come up with, is that an overly loud sound mix has been made and they have to go back and rework the entire sound mix. No doubt they also reworked the sound mix, but they were also cutting out all kinds of stuff no one wanted to see, except perhaps big fans of <i>Babe: Pig in the City</i>, such as myself. I would love to see the initial cut of this film. And for sure, when the film finally hit theaters, it had its fans. In fact, at the time, I thought it must have been a hit, because its biggest boosters were the highest profile critics in the US: Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

Babe: 28:48

Pig in the City<i>was directed, co-written and co-produced</i><i>by George Miller, who has made an even better film than the original.</i><i>I was startled how much I liked it.</i><i>This is a magnificent, towering achievement.</i><i>We're dazzled by it.</i> Siskel named it his top film of the year, and it sounds like a young Tim Robey might have too. So I used to do film reviews as a student when I was at university,

and I went to see <i>Babe: 29:10

Pig in the City</i> on my own to review it, and I couldn't believe how strange and weird and dark the film was. It just kind of bowled me over. And then I made a very odd decision, which was I decided to drag friends along and I went again. I went about two days later to watch it again. I was like, "Guys, you have to come and see this film."It is insane." But alas, a lot of folks didn't make it through their first watch. Especially the second time. I do remember there were like families there who'd come along expecting, you know, the first <i>Babe</i> film. And as dark sequence followed dark sequence, the noises of child distress coming from like around us further down and children just kind of basically running away from their seats, families, families just abandoning the film that was very apparent. And I still admire every, every flex that he made in this film. Every perverse choice, I think is quite interesting and admirable, but certainly not crowd pleasing.

<i>Babe: 30:10

Pig in the City</i> made just $69 million worldwide. Heads quickly rolled. It cost so much money.$90 million. That also, by the way, was the budget of another Universal film that came out right at the same time, which was also a huge flop. The other film is <i>Meet Joe Black</i>. The overall head of Universal's entertainment division was fired the week<i>Meet Joe Black</i> came out, then the week that <i>Babe</i> came out, Casey Silver, who was the chairman of Universal Pictures, was also sacked. Universal had to completely rethink its entire film division. Meanwhile, George Miller, who I want to say here is one of my favorite filmmakers ever, didn't direct another movie for eight years. And since then, it's been kind of a roller coaster for him.<i>Ladies and gentlemen. Start your engines.</i> His rebound was <i>Happy Feet</i> in 2006, which was him going back into the realm of children's entertainment again, probably a little chastened, a little bit like, don't worry, I will make it nice this time. That film did very well. But then, curiously, the second<i>Happy Feet</i> was a big flop again. And that's just happened again, of course, with <i>Furiosa</i>, which has done so much less well than <i>Fury Road</i> did.<i>- I'm Furiosa!- The darkest of angels.</i> He's got this kind of bipolar career where, commercially, he swings up and down, even though the quality of the filmmaking is often extremely good, in both cases, he suffers these flops.<i>Do you have it in you to make it epic?</i> Although I think you may have actually hit on something here, which is that in all those flops, he doesn't want to settle for whatever winning formula he's created. In some sense, he almost like resets the mythology, every time he makes a <i>Mad Max</i> movie. He, like, moves it forward and changes the rules a little bit. And just like he's not content to do what he did last time. In almost any situation, to the point that with <i>Furiosa</i>, it's like I'm going to do a<i>Mad Max</i> movie without Mad Max in it. I could actually, one thing I could add is that the character in<i>Babe: Pig in the City</i>, that actually reminds me a lot of George Miller in terms of his approach to making films, his whole sensibility, is actually the bull terrier. That is sort of one of the scariest characters, because it spends half of its timetime chasing Babe with its studded collar, trying to grab Babe and presumably eat Babe before nearly drowning in the river, being rescued and then becoming Babe's essentially bodyguard. And this dog at one point says"A murderous shadow lies hard across my soul." That is pure George Miller. That is absolutely everything that George Miller stands for, this murderous shadow. He can't really direct a film without being, there being a murderous shadow somewhere. Whether it's penguins, whether it's pigs, there's got to be a murderous shadow. And yeah, he certainly stamps one on this film. And that's the MUBI podcast for this week. Follow us this season for more stories about great films with bad box office. Next time, the gender bending movie that tanked the career of one of the greatest actors in film history and gave our season its title. When I became interested in Katharine Hepburn, I remember my mum being like,"Oh, box office poison. Box office poison." She kept saying this, you know,"You know, she became box office poison." The story of Katharine Hepburn in <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i>, with guests including movie star and Hepburn devotee Rebecca Hall. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, if you love this show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen. Won't you? Let them know we're something special. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or you just want to unload any <i>Pig in the City</i> related trauma, email us at podcast@mubi.com. Now let's roll credits. This episode of the MUBI Podcast was written, hosted, and edited by me, Rico Gagliano, based on the new book

<i>Box Office Poison: 34:09

A Hollywood Story in a Century of Flops</i> by Tim Robey that's published by Faber & Faber in the UK and Hanover Square in the US. Go get it. Ciara McEniff is our Producer. Jackson Musker is our Booking Producer. Steven Colon does our Sound Mastering. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick, except the track <i>Hot Smoke</i> by the band People with Bodies. Extra thanks this week to Timothy Maher, Christopher Olan, David Harper for recording Tim, and especially Carina Lesser. This show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, go watch some movies and remember failure is okay.