The counterculture audience MGM hoped to draw largely ignored the film during its brief theatrical run and taken altogether the outcome was a notorious box-office bomb. Production expenses were at least $7 million and only $900,000 was made in the domestic release. The film was listed in the 1978 book "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time". It has been described as "the worst film ever made by a director of genius" but it "is still absolutely watchable because of the magic of Antonioni's eye". Over 20 years after the film's release, "Rolling Stone" editor David Fricke wrote that ""Zabriskie Point" was one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history." It was the only film Antonioni directed in the United States, where in 1994 he was given the Honorary Academy Award "in recognition of his place as one of the cinema's master visual stylists."