Margot Robbie defends box office flop and predicts it will be appreciated in 20 years

Robbie said of the 2022 film: ‘I love it’

Margot Robbie has expressed surprise that her 2022 film Babylon flopped, saying she “still can’t figure out why people hated it.”

The debauched Hollywood epic, directed by Oscar-winning La La Land filmmaker Damian Chazelle, was a notorious box office failure, making back just $15 million at the US box office and $63 million worldwide against a budget of $80 million.

Speaking on the Talking Pictures podcast, Robbie said of the film: “I love it... I know I am biased because I am very close to the project and I obviously believe in it, but I still can’t figure out why people hated it.

“I wonder if in 20 years people are going to be like, ‘Wait, Babylon didn’t do well at the time?’ Like when you hear that Shawshank Redemption was a failure at the time and you’re like, ‘How is that possible?’”

Robbie played rising star Nellie LaRoy in the film, a character inspired by the real-life actor Clara Bow. She described Chazelle’s exacting demands while making the film, saying: “Damian is so thorough. Do you know what I loved so much about working with him? I felt like no one had really put their foot to the floor with the gas, but he wanted that all the time. He wanted more always. Even when we were prepping.”

Robbie went on to recall the various vocal choices she’d tried out for the character, saying: “When we were trying to figure out what the accent should be for that character, I gave him 51 different versions of an accent.

Margot Robbie in ‘Babylon' (Paramount)

“It was like doing a one woman show. We started off with like Boston. Nellie is from Boston. Here’s what she sounds like if she’s from Arkansas. Then I got specific. Here is Nellie if she was a mixture of Snookie from the Jersey Shore and Joe Pesci. Now I’m going to be a little bit of Fran Drescher mixed with Snookie. This is how specific we got. At one point I counted all the voice things I offered him at that point and it was 51.”

While Babylon struggled at the box office, The Independent film critic Clarisse Loughrey was full of praise.

In a five-star review she called the film a “masterpiece” and wrote: “Tailor-made to divide audiences, this debauched drama – and a clear repudiation to those who once accused Chazelle of being too sentimental a director – puts a bullet in the head of any notion that the film industry’s silent era was ever austere or quaint.

“This was a frontier time, where the art of cinema was built from the ground up with zero rules and very little restraint. It was a place where the soul-sick and hungry could reinvent themselves, but not without considerable personal cost.”