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2001 topped 1968's box office
The Flop Myth
The old tale holds that the film flopped at the box office until hippies on drugs turned it into a hit. The hippies did line up on day one, long before a week or two had passed.
What Variety Printed
Hollywood notices a hit. Variety ran blaring headlines about how well 2001 was doing, and Michael Benson keeps a folder full of those pieces from that year.
Hollywood Shifts
Hollywood shifted away from the Western, a paradigm that was dying anyway even as spaghetti Westerns turned out great films in the late 1960s. That shift would not have happened without the commercial success of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Why did studios chase young audiences after 1968?
By the late 1960s television had cut movie attendance sharply, and several major studios were losing money. Films aimed at young viewers, like The Graduate in 1967 and Easy Rider in 1969, persuaded studios to hand projects to younger directors with more personal styles. That run of the early 1970s is often called New Hollywood. Easy Rider cost less than a million dollars and earned many times that.
Why were Westerns fading by the late 1960s?
Television had absorbed the genre in the 1950s and early 1960s, with dozens of Western series filling prime time. Audiences had seen the same stories and landscapes for years. Italian directors such as Sergio Leone reworked the form, with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 and Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968. The series Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons, from 1955 to 1975.
Why did 2001 open in Cinerama theaters?
The film was shot in Super Panavision 70, a large-format process that used 65 millimeter film, and it needed theaters with big, deeply curved screens. Cinerama houses were built for that kind of presentation. It opened as a roadshow, with reserved seats and an intermission. The New York premiere took place at the Loew's Capitol Theatre on April 2, 1968.
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