In terms of measurable success, you can’t call Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element anything other than an overwhelmingly successful venture, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t split opinion straight down the middle for a variety of reasons.
At a cost of $90 million it was the single most expensive European production in history, and it repaid that faith and investment by hauling in $264 million at the box office to go down as not just one of the biggest global hits of 1997, but the top-earning French film of all-time; a record that it held onto with an iron grip for a decade and a half.
On the other side of the coin, The Fifth Element secured two nominations at the Razzies and four from the Stinkers Bad Movies Awards to go along with a solitary nod at the Academy Awards, while it was also subject to a plagiarism lawsuit that spent no less than seven years being dragged through the courts before ultimately being tossed out.
A regular fixture on both “Best Of” and “Worst Of” lists in the year of its release, more than a quarter of a century on and we can surely all agree that The Fifth Element is a mind-bending delight. Sure, it’s completely unhinged, borderline self-indulgent, and undeniably excessive, but that’s part of the charm.
iTunes subscribers seem to be willing to give it a shot, with FlixPatrol outing it as one of the most-watched titles on the platform heading into the weekend. Whatever you think of it as a whole, nobody in their right mind is going to be able to deny that The Fifth Element isn’t one-of-a-kind, regardless of whether that’s for better or worse.