Critical Reception and Legacy (Blow Out) Blow Out

Blow Out lost a third of its budget at the box office

Blow Out was a commercial failure:

Metric	Amount
Budget	~$18 million
Domestic gross	~$12 million

De Palma was blunt about what the numbers meant:

"There was no bigger disaster than Blow Out." — Brian De Palma, Interview Magazine (2011)

The failure was especially painful because the reviews were the best of his career. The audience simply didn't come — possibly because of the bleak ending, possibly because Travolta's star power was waning, possibly because the film was too smart for the summer marketplace.

Contemporary critical response was De Palma's strongest

Roger Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and called it De Palma's "best and most original work":

"De Palma is more successful than ever before at populating his plot with three-dimensional characters. We believe in the reality of the people played by John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1981)

Pauline Kael wrote the review that placed De Palma alongside the New Hollywood masters:

"De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies — that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we're moved by is an artist's vision." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

Kael praised both the fluidity and the hallucinatory quality of the filmmaking:

"You don't see set pieces in Blow Out — it flows, and everything that happens seems to go right to your head." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

"It's hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you'll never make the mistake of thinking that it's only a dream." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

The film holds a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes (from later aggregation) and has a Metacritic score of 84/100.

Tarantino declared it one of the greatest films ever made

Quentin Tarantino named Blow Out as one of his three "desert island" films, alongside Taxi Driver and Rio Bravo:

"It's Brian De Palma's finest film, which means it's one of the finest movies ever made, because as we all know, Brian De Palma is the best director of his generation." — Quentin Tarantino, Far Out Magazine (1994)

"John Travolta gives one of the best performances of all time in this movie." — Quentin Tarantino, Far Out Magazine (1994)

Tarantino's admiration had practical consequences: he cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction (1994) specifically because of his work in Blow Out, resurrecting Travolta's career.

The Criterion Collection canonized the film

Blow Out was released as Criterion Collection #562 in 2011, with a 2K restoration of the original 35mm camera negative supervised by De Palma. A 4K UHD edition sourced from a new 16-bit scan followed in 2022. The Criterion imprimatur — joining a catalog that includes Kurosawa, Bergman, and Fellini — is the clearest signal of the film's canonization. Arrow Video released a UK edition with its own set of exclusive interviews in 2013. The full history of the film's home video releases — from 1983 VHS through the reference-quality 4K disc — is covered in Physical Media Releases (Blow Out).