Chris
It’s always a bummer when great movies underperform at the box office, but what’s even worse is when they’re such massive disasters that they derail careers despite featuring top-tier work. Such was the case, infamously, with Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, a 1981 thriller that ended the director’s superb run at the box office and, more than that, really crippled the then-bulletproof career of its star, John Travolta. The fallout paved the way for a disastrous run of films that it would take him well over a decade to recover from.
But why did people hate Blow Out, even if it’s now considered one of De Palma’s best films, so celebrated that it’s become one of the most popular titles in the Criterion Collection? It has to do with politics, violence, and… well… disco.
This is exactly what happened to Blow Out.
Brian De Palma, Carrie, and the Rise of New Hollywood
Jump back to 1976. That was the year Brian De Palma released the movie that elevated him to the A-list: his adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. A smash hit, Carrie returned more than ten times its budget to United Artists and made De Palma one of the biggest names in the rising ranks of New Hollywood alongside Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and others.
While mostly remembered for Sissy Spacek’s star-making turn, two other young actors played memorable roles as obnoxious, bullying teens: John Travolta and Nancy Allen. Allen would later marry De Palma and headline another huge hit for him, Dressed to Kill. Travolta, meanwhile, was about to become a worldwide phenomenon.
John Travolta Becomes a Global Superstar
Shortly after filming Carrie, Travolta landed a role on the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, playing Sweathogs leader Vincent Barbarino. Sweet-natured, if a little thick, the character made Travolta a massive teen heartthrob. He even scored a top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Let Her In.”
But what happened next took him from teen idol to arguably the biggest global superstar of the 1970s: he was cast in a mid-budget disco movie called Saturday Night Fever.
The film turned Travolta into a disco-era James Dean. Propelled by the iconic Bee Gees soundtrack, Saturday Night Fever became a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon. Quentin Tarantino often talks on his Video Archives Podcast about just how big Travolta was at the time, comparing his rise to that of the Beatles. Modern audiences know Travolta from his second wave of stardom after Pulp Fiction, but back then he was basically a one-man Beatlemania.
There were John Travolta Superstar dolls not based on any specific movie, just on Travolta himself. In Italy, a lookalike known as John Travolto even had a career starring in movies like The Man with Travolta’s Face. That’s how huge he was.
How Disco Helped Doom Blow Out
This level of fame is part of what doomed Blow Out. At his peak, Travolta was viewed as the boy next door even though Saturday Night Fever is far grittier than its reputation suggests. Tony Manero is violent, profane, and even witnesses a gang rape he could have stopped. The film is a critique of toxic masculinity, but that nuance was largely lost.
Why? Because after Fever became a hit and after Travolta grew even more popular with the family-friendly musical Grease, the studio reissued Saturday Night Fever in a sanitized, PG-rated cut. This disco-only version eliminated the adult content and became the one that played endlessly on TV throughout the 1980s. For years, it was easier to find on VHS than the original R-rated cut.
That re-edit cemented Travolta’s image as an inoffensive teen idol, making any attempt to break away from it risky. He tried, cautiously, with 1980’s Urban Cowboy, playing a flawed, misogynistic blue-collar cowboy who ultimately redeems himself.
Blow Out would be something else entirely.
A Hard-R Reinvention: The Premise of Blow Out
In Blow Out, Travolta plays Jack Terry, a sound technician for a low-rent exploitation film company. While recording sound effects one night, he accidentally captures audio of a fatal car accident: a tire blowout, a car plunging into a lake, and, crucially, a gunshot.
Jack rescues a young woman from the car but can’t save the man inside, who turns out to be a presidential candidate poised to win the election. Reviewing the tape, Jack realizes the accident was actually an assassination.
The woman he saved is Sally, a makeup artist played by Nancy Allen. She was helping set up the candidate for a sleazy private investigator (Dennis Franz) to manufacture a sex scandal. The real villain, however, is Burke (a chilling John Lithgow) who begins murdering women who resemble Sally to frame a serial killer, ensuring her eventual death looks random rather than political.
De Palma Goes Full De Palma
De Palma’s vision for Blow Out was audacious: a political conspiracy thriller mashed up with an Italian-style giallo, the genre he’d already explored in Dressed to Kill. Like that film, Blow Out leans heavily into nudity and violence but in a self-aware, critical way.
The movie opens with a sleazy tracking shot of a killer stalking nude college girls, only to reveal it’s a movie-within-a-movie produced by the exploitation hacks Jack works for. De Palma is condemning and mocking the very audience that might find those images titillating, including fans of his own earlier work.
Though often compared to Alfred Hitchcock, Blow Out also draws heavily from real-life events: the Kennedy assassination, the Zapruder film, and Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal. De Palma even borrows a 360-degree camera move from Michael Snow’s experimental short The Central Region for a devastating scene where Jack realizes all his evidence has been erased.
A Massive Budget and a Bigger Gamble
De Palma and distributor Filmways were convinced they had a masterpiece and priced it accordingly. Blow Out cost $18 million, an enormous sum in 1981. For context, it cost $8 million more than Star Wars and nearly triple the budget of Dressed to Kill.
That money went onscreen, particularly in the film’s massive finale, set during a fictional “Liberty Day” parade in Philadelphia, where Jack desperately chases the killer through hundreds of extras in one of De Palma’s most ambitious set pieces.
The Ending Audiences Rejected
Despite strong reviews from critics like Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and Gene Siskel, Blow Out was a catastrophe with audiences. Much of the backlash centered on its bleak ending.
Jack, haunted by a past failure that cost a cop his life, convinces Sally to wear a wire to expose the conspiracy. But he underestimates Burke’s depravity. He arrives seconds too late to save her, kills Burke, and then completely breaks.
Jack abandons the investigation, letting the conspiracy go unpunished. Worse, he dubs Sally’s dying scream into a cheap horror movie he’s working on, immortalizing her death and forcing himself to hear it forever. It’s devastating, nihilistic, and unforgettable.
American audiences hated it. European audiences were more receptive… because, well, it’s Europe.
Box-Office Fallout and Career Damage
Blow Out grossed just $13.8 million. Filmways nearly collapsed as a result. De Palma eventually rebounded with Scarface in 1983, though even that film was controversial at the time. His next true crowd-pleaser wouldn’t arrive until The Untouchables in 1987.
Nancy Allen’s performance was widely misunderstood as ditzy rather than innocent, but she bounced back with RoboCop, arguably her most iconic role.
Travolta, however, was devastated. With disco dead, audiences stopped showing up. He chased commercial projects that damaged his credibility: Staying Alive, Two of a Kind, Perfect. Even his hit Look Who’s Talking owed more to a wisecracking baby voiced by Bruce Willis than to Travolta himself.
How Blow Out Saved Travolta in the End
Ironically, the film that helped ruin Travolta’s career would later save it.
Blow Out always had passionate defenders, chief among them Quentin Tarantino, who has long called it a masterpiece. Travolta’s performance left such an impression on Tarantino that Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega was written specifically for him.
That role launched Travolta’s second act, leading to classics like Get Shorty, Face/Off, and more.
The Legacy of Blow Out
Blow Out may have lost the battle at the box office, but it won the war. Today, it’s widely regarded as Brian De Palma’s greatest film and a crown jewel of the Criterion Collection.
It’s proof that sometimes masterpieces fail in their moment, only to be discovered, appreciated, and vindicated years later.
And yes: Blow Out is a masterpiece.
