The Ten Biggest Box Office Flop Movies Of All Time
A Wrinkle in Time – 2018: Loss: $131m
A good illustration of what happens when you try to film an unfilmable book. Disney’s attempt to adapt Madeleine L’Engle’s quirky fable about a child chasing her scientist father through the dimensions founders under the wright of its own self-regard and the burden of a starry cast.
This flop movie was, strangely, equally praised and criticised for its heavy use of CGI and messages of female empowerment and diversity.
Review: “I feel as though this film is some sort of punishment for not having read the book as a child. Dreadful. Absolutely dreadful.” – Rotten Tomatoes.
John Carter – 2012: Loss: $127m
Based on the Barsoom series by Tarzan writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, this could have been a sci-fi smash instead of a legendary flop movie – but, spooked by the 2011 failure of Mars Needs Moms, Disney took the “… of Mars” out of the title, leaving cinema-goers understandably asking “Who the ^&%* is John Carter?”
Relying on an unnecessarily complex plot and unconvincing fight scenes, director Andrew Stanton couldn’t transfer the charm of his Pixar animations Finding Nemo and Wall-E to his first live action production, and despite the movie being a huge success in Russia, plans for a trilogy were shelved.
Review – “A dreary, convoluted trudge – a soulless sprawl of computer-generated blippery” – Boston Globe,
Cats – 2019: Loss: $1144m
Universally panned for its grotesque motion capture cat/human hybrid effects, incomprehensible plot and terrible acting, this adaptation of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s stage musical was released with some unfinished effects which were later updated, too late to save it from a critical savaging, with descriptions including ‘exhausting’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘grotesque’.
Worryingly, there are already popular singalong performance taking place, suggesting Cats may become a cult classic rather than the all-time champion flop movie it deserves to be.
Review: “Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery” – Rotten Tomatoes
See also: Who Are the 10 Highest Grossing Movie Actors of All Time?
The Fall of the Roman Empire – 1964: Loss: $118m
Proving that the do make them liked they used to – massive box-office flop movies that is – The Fall of the Roman Empire featured an all-star cast including Sophia Loren, James Mason, Omar Sharif and Christopher Plummer, as well as the largest outdoor set ever built (a Roman forum), and vast spectacles including a battle using 8,000 extras and 2,500 cavalry – all of this with no use of CGI or even matte painted backgrounds.
Nonetheless, the movie was panned for its three-and-a-half hour length, unclear plot and lack of human interest.
Review: “So massive and incoherent, you’re likely to have the feeling that the Roman Empire has fallen on you.” – New York Times
Terminator: Dark Fate – 2019: Loss: $132m
The sixth in the Terminator franchise disregarded the time-travelling plot of three of its predecessors so it could reunite the stars of the original Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton.
In a perfect illustration of the likely result of flogging a dead horse, with its enormous production and marketing budgets giving it a break-even point of $450-4480m, Dark Fate crashed to box office disaster, killing the franchise as dead as a T-1000 in an industrial smelter.
Review: “Cobbled together by dunces in a last-ditch effort to wring revenue from a moribund concept” – Wall Street Journal
Forget about the popular hit movies everyone loves, why not plan a viewing programme based around some of these flop movies that united the audience in rating them as two big thumbs down, and see if you agree with the critics!
