Biggest Hollywood Fail

[inisideguy]

Yeah, it was. But that was the inflation numbers. If you don't count inflation but go with nominal loss ... the list goes like this:

Mortal Engines
The Lone Ranger
A Wrinkle in Time
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
John Carter
Gemini Man
Terminator: Dark Fate
Monster Trucks
Jack the Giant Slayer

If you go by value to production budget lost, you get:

Justice League
John Carter
Solo: A Star Wars Story
The Lone Ranger
Transformers: The Last Knight
Tenet (currently playing) *
Dark Phoenix
Green Lantern
The Mummy (2017)
Terminator: Dark Fate

Again, those are just quantifying them by BO loss with production/marketing vs. BO take.

No objectivity involved.

Thats a pretty modern list. Wasn't ISHTAR one of the biggest money losers of all time?

[inisideguy]

Wasn't Warcraft a major dud? I remember people on this board saying it would be bigger than LOTR.

I think Warcraft did pretty good overseas.

[BeastieRunner]

Thats a pretty modern list. Wasn't ISHTAR one of the biggest money losers of all time?

I think you will see lots of modern movies on BO loser lists because of $100 million plus budgets becoming more of a norm. So those losses are verifiably bigger in the all time list.

FWIW Gone With the Wind is still in the 100 flops of all time.

I could do some digging by decade.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Thats a pretty modern list. Wasn't ISHTAR one of the biggest money losers of all time?

Ishtar is such a weird film anyways. I feel like many people now know it by rep more than actually seeing it and it kind of has a rep that people who actually watched it either were mixed or liked it.

[inisideguy]

I think you will see lots of modern movies on BO loser lists because of $100 million plus budgets becoming more of a norm. So those losses are verifiably bigger in the all time list.

FWIW Gone With the Wind is still in the 100 flops of all time.

I could do some digging by decade.

Yea Wikipedia says Ishtar made 14.3 million at the box office, on a 51 million production budget plus 20 million in marketing costs. So percentage wise that is really bad all time.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

JJ Abrams splitting TROS in two parts must have been for two reasons.

1. The first half will be to clear up the mess of Last jedi

2. the second half will be the movie he always intended to make for the last film.

The only issue is JJ Abrams is as much to blame for Last Jedi as Rian Johnson. he was no star wars saviour like he deluded himself to be when he came back for TROS.

if he had split TROS in two halves, the first half may have been so bad and unbelievable as a movie that the second half would have had trouble making profit.

Well the problem is he didn't actually contribute anything. He remade ANH to be a palette cleanser and just left a bunch of vague threads with no direction. Rian filled it in and people got upset with the way they did it and JJ had to make a generic corporately sanitized piece of garbage that tried to please everyone and it broke the film. It retroactively makes TFA bad because none of the potential of it mattered.

[inisideguy]

Ishtar is such a weird film anyways. I feel like many people now know it by rep more than actually seeing it and it kind of has a rep that people who actually watched it either were mixed or liked it.

Oh for sure. There are tons of movies that lost a lot of money that many people liked. Just Solo being one example being discussed here.

[Gaastra]

FWIW Gone With the Wind is still in the 100 flops of all time.

Umm. It's the REAL highest grossing movie of all time without 3-d prices and inflation prices.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/22/top-...inflation.html

[Jim Kelly]

The fact that 1990's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES was a flop took everyone by surprise. It was based on a bestseller by Tom Wolfe; it starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis when all of their film careers were on fire; it was directed by Brian frickin' De Palma, who had had a string of commercial and critical successes. It seemed impossible that such a movie could fail. And yet it did. That was such a shock at the time--industry insiders were picking up their jaws from the floor for years after.

[Sutekh]

Oh for sure. There are tons of movies that lost a lot of money that many people liked. Just Solo being one example being discussed here.

Yeah, I'm a fan of Solo, John Carter, Sahara, Thirteenth Warrior and various other box office 'failures.' I sometimes think my tastes are just weird.

[Zauriel]

Biggest Hollywood Failure was Amber Heard and Johnny Depp's marriage.

[LoganAlpha30X33]

Would that JEM movie be considered a failure as they pulled it from theaters after like a week or so...because it was doing so poorly...

[Rev9]

Too early to call , but WW1984 seems to be getting the unwanted 'f' word association.I've seen it and I wholeheartedly agree to me personally it was a huge disappointment compared to the predecessor

[mburns]

Biggest bomb of all time is Taylor Kitsch and his 2012 films. He was the star of John Carter, Battleship and Savages. All commercial and critical bombs though Savages was low budget so it didn't lose as much money as the other two. How many actors can say they were the star of two films that lost around $200 million each within a 3 month span.

[LoganAlpha30X33]

I wonder how John Carter would have done without Disney being behind it, as Disney seems a tad tame for it given some of the costumes in the comics and such...