This Critically-Slammed Robin Williams Movie's Set Is Now A Major Tourist Attraction

Robert Altman's 1980 film "Popeye" is a baffling creation indeed. Altman had risen to fame with a series of ultra-naturalistic dramas that employed overlapping dialogue, casual editing, and documentary-like camera work. Critics loved his films "M*A*S*H" in 1970 and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" in 1971. His 1974 music epic "Nashville" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and his 1977 movie "3 Women" may be one of the director's best. His films were moving, thoughtful, adult, and often intense. He told stories, but also managed to capture an ineffable quality of real life. He is beloved by film students to this day. 

"Popeye," then, was a massive departure for the director. "Popeye" was based on E.C. Segar's sailor character from his "Thimble Theater" comics, already famously adapted into a long series of animated shorts by the Fleischer Brothers in the 1930s. In the 1960s, new "Popeye" cartoons were produced for TV, and reruns of both animated Popeyes lasted on Saturday morning cartoon blocks for a decade. "Popeye" was a well-established part of pop culture canon by 1980, and it seemed that a feature film about the character made sense, at least from a marketing perspective.

But Altman's approach to the material was weird and expensive. Weird, because the movie is largely shapeless, following Popeye (Robin Williams) to a fishing village called Sweethaven, where he falls in love with Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall) and runs afoul of Olive's boyfriend Bluto (Paul L. Smith). There's a lot of incomprehensible muttering, formless atonal songs (by Harry Nilsson), and no real story to speak of. 

Expensive because Altman, against all logic, built the entire city of Sweethaven from scratch on the coast of Malta. Houses were functional and complete, even if Altman never intended to shoot there. The budget for "Popeye" was $20 million, largely because of the cost it took to construct a whole village. The Sweethaven Village set remains standing to this day, and is still used as a tourist attraction by the Maltese tourism board.

No one can say why Altman felt that it was necessary to build an entire city for "Popeye." The film certainly is rich in visual detail, but there was no reason why the filmmakers shouldn't have saved money by constructing facades. Executive producer Barry Diller alleged that cocaine use was prevalent on the set, which may go a long way to explain the chaos. The Sweethaven set also included actual lodging for the cast and crew, editing bays, and a sound studio. The shoot was long and arduous, and was infamously delayed by bad weather. 

Of course, once the shooting wrapped, the nation of Malta now had a fully functional city on its hands. And while one might assume they would demolish the village to restore the coastline's natural beauty — it's located on Anchor Bay — Malta took advantage of the situation by opening the village to the public. One can now, to this very day, visit Popeye Village, a miniature theme park with swimming, restaurants, and other tourist attractions. It's most popular in the summer, but it's open year-round. Romantic couples into Popeye can also book Popeye-themed weddings there. The island also contains the ruins of temples many thousands of years old, and local 4-D movies regularly show documentaries of their construction. 

This was the best possible outcome for Sweethaven, as "Popeye" was critically reviled. It managed to earn about $50 million at the box office, ensuring that it at least earned a little money, but the film was such a critical failure, it remained notorious for decades. Altman initially wanted to tear down Sweethaven, but the Maltese government (according to an article in Medium) had a deal that allowed them to decide the town's fate. They elected to leave the town standing and opened it as a tourist attraction as early as 1982. It's a daily stop-by kind of town, and not a full-on resort. That's what the rest of Malta is for. 

According to one report, people are still making Popeye fan films there to this very day.