Greatest box office bombs
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 21, 2012
Films have the potential to skyrocket the profits of a studio, or to send it into ruins and bankruptcy. Despite its $200m black hole, "John Carter" still has some way to go to match this roll call of cinematic infamy.
Films that cost more to make than they acquire in revenue (both domestic and worldwide) are considered box-office catastrophes or bombs. Studios split grosses with theater owners, so even if a movie makes as much as its production budget, it's still losing, and that's before even considering marketing costs. A film often must make almost double its budget to become profitable. Most big box-office bombs are summer blockbusters which are enormously expensive and face stiff competition.
Movie audiences often love to relish the fact that some films, such as "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" (2001), "Cutthroat Island" (1995) or "Heaven's Gate" (1980) turn out to be monumental flops which bankrupted their studios, and are fascinated by the details of why certain directors/actors and their films fail. Sometimes an actor's or director's career suffers, sometimes not. Most A-list directors and actors have suffered through at least one major flop, including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee and Brian DePalma, to name just a few.
Some films are unjustly labeled flops, such as "Cleopatra" (1963) and "Waterworld" (1995), although both are included in this listing. In recent years, some of these low-income producing films have become profitable (after initial box-office failures) with strong international grosses, and further profits from the sales of movies to TV syndication and to home video/DVD releases or re-releases. A prominent example of a film which did very poorly in the US, (i.e., "The Golden Compass" (2007) with only $70 million (domestic revenue), easily recouped its production budget costs of $180 million with $302 million (foreign revenue) - for a total of $372 million (worldwide).
This kind of comeback has been particularly true for films in the cult films genre, such as Spielberg's 1941 (1979), or action films with a big name star, such as "Last Action Hero" (1993), "Batman & Robin" (1997) or "Speed 2: Cruise Control" (1997), or larger epics such as "Alexander" (2004) or "Poseidon" (2006).
Here are Hollywood's biggest losers at the box office (figures from filmsite.org):
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| Stealth (2005)
Net loss (adjusted for inflation): US$111.7 million |
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