The Strange and Twisted Tale of… The Movie That Grossed $30

Zyzzyx Road is a independent film made in 2006 with a budget of $1.2 million. Even though it stared Tom Sizemore and Katherine Heigl, it is notoriously on record as the lowest grossing film of all time with a grand total of $30 in ticket sales.

Here is Entertainment Weekly’s in depth piece on the strange and twisted events that led to this disastrous cautionary tale.

”What if they released a movie and nobody came?” read the headline. The story, from the scrappy film site CHUD.com, described a truly spectacular failure — a 2006 thriller called Zyzzyx Road that, despite starring Tom Sizemore and Grey’s Anatomy’s Katherine Heigl, had grossed a grand total of $30 at the box office. ”I was mortified,” says Penney, who, as it happens, had written, directed, and produced the movie in question. ”I went, ‘Oh, my God, this is horrendous.’ I’m reading it and saying, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no! This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.’ I’ve been through a lot of crap in my career. I’ve seen so many things. But this movie is like my baby, and it’s being dragged around in the street with people poking sticks in it. It was brutal. It was ugly. I was reeling.”

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