LogFAQs > #976635652

Black Hole wasn't really made to compete with Star Wars. It was more that it was made to exploit Star Wars' success (much like Battlestar Galactica was). Star Wars opened a lot of doors for cheaply-made sci-fi in the late 70s/early 80s that would otherwise never have existed. Some of which was good, even if most of it was kind of crap.

And Black Hole was an awesome movie, and only failed because people are stupid. People went in expecting "DISNEY!" and got weird creepy existentialism and lobotomized robot people. The dissonance led to a lot of negative reviews (in the same way that people hated The Cable Guy because they went in expecting Ace Ventura or Dumb and Dumber and got dark comedy instead). But if you ignore the context and just watch it as its own movie, it's pretty great.

It's sort of the same scenario as to why Who Framed Roger Rabbit got released under the Touchstone Pictures label - they were afraid that people would be put off by the darker nature of the film if they released it as a straight Disney film.