Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” boast rave reviews, spectacular filmmaking and 11 Academy Award nominations between them, which makes it all the more unfortunate that both films flopped so hard at the box office. Being an Oscar-winning director hardly makes you immune from delivering a box office bomb. Just ask great talents like Spielberg, del Toro, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve. All of these top filmmakers have at least one box office disappointment on their hands, even if the films that didn’t find an audience in theaters were great movies that deserved to perform much stronger.

A box office failure says nothing about a film’s quality. Some of the most critically-acclaimed titles of the 21st century got their starts as box office flops, be it “Children of Men” or “The Master” and “Under the Skin.”  In other words, don’t judge a movie by its box office. Variety offers up a selection of great films that flopped at the box office in the list below.