Box Office Poison is the title given in popular culture to a trade magazine advertisement taken out on May 4, 1938, in The Hollywood Reporter by the Independent Theatre Owners Association.
Practically all of the major studios are burdened with stars—whose public appeal is negligible—receiving tremendous salaries necessitated by contractual obligations.
Having these stars under contract, and paying them sizeable sums weekly, the studios find themselves in the unhappy position to having put these box office deterrents in expensive pictures in the hope that some return on the investment might be had.
This condition is not only burdensome to the studios and its stockholders but is likewise no boon to exhibitors who in the final analysis, suffer by the non-drawing power of these players.
Among these players, whose dramatic ability is unquestioned, but whose box office draw is nil, can be numbered Mae West, Edward Arnold, Garbo, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, and many, many others.
— Independent Theatre Owners AssociationArticles appeared in many US newspapers chronicling the uproar in Hollywood after the association published the ad.
Actress Hepburn last week terminated the RKO Radio contract that had brought her from $75,000 to $100,000 a picture and was considering five better offers "They say I'm a has-been," scoffed she.
[9][10] Over the years, several more "Box Office Poison" lists have been submitted in newspapers, in magazines, or more recently, online.
In 1949, Mary Armitage's Film Close-Ups newspaper labeled many stars as "poison" at the box office, among them Sylvia Sidney, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones, John Hodiak, and two actresses that in 1938 were said to have "deserved" their salaries, Bette Davis and Shirley Temple.
A BBC article about Hepburn and The Philadelphia Story, written in 2021, still refers to her being labeled in 1938 by Brandt as "box office poison".