Trivia / The Swarm (1978)

• All-Star Cast: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Patty Duke, José Ferrer, Lee Grant, Fred MacMurray, Slim Pickens, Henry Fonda...
• Billing Displacement: José Ferrer is billed eighth on the poster, despite the fact that he's in the film for maybe a minute before being killed off. Poor Bradford Dillman, who plays Major Baker, while not one of the main lead roles, still has a ton more screen time than Ferrer does, and almost makes it to the end of the film (before dying with Richard Widmark's character. He's basically billed last on the poster, as the final two names (Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray) each receive special billing. To make it even worse, Dillman has more screen time than the two specially billed actors as well.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $11.5 million to $21 million. Box office, $7.6 million. This didn't last more than two weeks in theaters, and was the first of three disastrous disaster movies that blew apart the career of Irwin Allen, followed by Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out....
• Creator Backlash:
  • After the film's financial failure, Irwin Allen forbade anyone to mention it around him.
  • It's just one of the many movies that Michael Caine isn't proud of. Bradford Dillman wasn't too keen on it either. (One suspects most of the cast agreed with them.)
• Creator Killer: Irwin Allen was a prolific TV producer in The '60s thanks to sci-fi hits with Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel. He soon became a force to be reckoned with in The '70s, populating the Disaster Movie craze with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. The success of both films earned Allen the nickname “The Master Of Disaster”. This film turned out to have been a disaster in a different context. Allen tried to recover by attempting to capture the same magic with Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, but that too was a critical and commercial dud. Finally, he attempted to recover with When Time Ran Out..., but its failure was so great it not only killed his theatrical career, but the genre he helped popularize. Allen returned to TV and remained there until his 1991 death.
• Dueling Movies: Averted; while The Swarm was in post-production, Warner Bros. found out that another movie about Africanized killer bees, simply called The Bees, was being made in Mexico by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. To avoid the competition, WB paid New World a significant amount of money to delay their film's release until The Swarm had run its course. Despite this, WB still ended up distributing their would-have-been competitor on home video.
• Genre-Killer: Though the '70s disaster movie boom continued for a couple more years, this was widely seen as the film that indicated that the genre was becoming totally burnt out. On top of that, its box-office failure was a big factor in changing the way studios approached summer movies. The Swarm had nearly twice the budget of the previous year's Star Wars, but spent almost all of it on the actors' salaries and resulted in the rest of the production looking like a glorified TV movie. On the other hand, it was notable as one of the first A-budget movies to be released nationwide in the U.S. all at once rather than being rolled out over weeks/months.
• Money, Dear Boy: Michael Caine and Lee Grant have both said in their autobiographies (What's It All About? and I Said "Yes" to Everything) that they did the film purely for the money. In Caine's case, he was planning to move from London to Los Angeles, and used his salary for the film to buy a house. He has also said that the opportunity to be part of an All-Star Cast appealed to him so much that he signed on before reading the script.
• What Could Have Been: John Williams was originally set to score this. But his usually on-point This Is Gonna Suck radar kicked in.

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