Entertainment
10 Box-Office Bombs That Lost $100 Million
As moviemaking as an industry continues to have higher and higher budgets for its most promising blockbuster releases, the potential for massive profits grows ever higher, with prominent modern-day successes having the possibility to be among the highest-grossing films in box office history. However, the risk of such high budgets also means that there is potential for catastrophic box office bombs, losing not just tens of millions of dollars, but losing over a hundred million dollars at the box office.
These hundred-million-dollar losers in the world of box office are far from a new phenomenon, but are certainly much more prominent as the budgets for blockbusters have skyrocketed to exceptional heights in recent years. On top of the high-budget films that completely failed to meet the mark, this can also apply to older or mid-budget blockbusters that had close to zero interest at the box office. These films have become infamous as some of Hollywood’s biggest financial failures.
10
‘The Marvels’ (2023)
For the vast majority of its existence, the MCU has stood as an unbreakable beacon of blockbuster success, with even the smallest of successes still earning hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for Disney and catapulting it as one of the most lucrative box-office franchises out there. However, the hot streak eventually had to end for the MCU, and while they were certainly trending downward throughout the 2020s, The Marvels was their first true box-office bomb, losing the studio $237 million.
The film was largely a victim of terrible timing to be an MCU release, faltering thanks to a string of lackluster releases in the years prior, leading to a complete lack of interest in Carol Danvers’ intergalactic adventure. Most films in an extended universe being asked to follow up the likes of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Secret Invasion were going to falter. The lukewarm execution of The Marvels only made Brie Larson’s MCU outing that much more of a box-office disappointment.
9
‘John Carter’ (2012)
Attempting to follow in the footsteps of massive sci-fi blockbusters like Avatar, John Carter has stood as one of the most recognizable examples of box-office disaster, with its massive budget resulting in middling failure that lost Disney $200 million. The thought process was that, since the original John Carter books were massively influential in sci-fi storytelling, they could find similar success if these classic stories were given an extravagant, blockbuster budget.
However, while the film may have largely influenced a lot of sci-fi worlds, this, in tandem, only made the eventual film adaptation feel incredibly generic and uninteresting to general audiences. The film just didn’t have a hook for audiences to really engage with, ironically debuting at second place behind The Lorax. What really hurt the film is that it was one of the most expensive movies of all time, with its overwhelming budget making its $248.1 million box office gross nowhere close to what it needed to find success.
8
‘Haunted Mansion’ (2023)
Yet another one of the many box-office disappointments that Disney had during 2023, Haunted Mansion stood as one of the most lackluster and poorly executed remakes of recent memory. Despite the film being relatively well-received by the audiences that did experience it, the film had one of the most shockingly ineffective release strategies imaginable that destroyed the movies chances of success before it even released.
Despite overwhelmingly dripping in Halloween and autumnal energy in all of its marketing and its very existence, the film, for some reason, had its wide theatrical release in the middle of the summer, a time when nobody was clamoring for Halloween-adjacent cinema. While this technically allowed the film to release on Disney+ when Halloween actually came around, it meant that it was never going to recoup its $150 million budget. As a result, the film lost around $117 million and further amplified Disney’s catastrophic year.
7
‘Mortal Engines’ (2018)
Produced and co-written by Peter Jackson and adapting a beloved series of young adult novels, Mortal Engines had high hopes of being the next big YA dystopian franchise, following in the footsteps of the likes of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. However, the book’s greatness didn’t translate into this bloated, sci-fi mess of a blockbuster, and the film instead became infamous as one of the biggest box-office flops of the 21st century.
The film almost single-handedly killed a lot of the interest in YA adaptations as a whole, as its cataclysmic $219 million loss spelled out to studios that simply adapting a beloved YA novel series was no longer an easy path to blockbuster success. It certainly didn’t help that critics and audiences alike did not enjoy this overstuffed mess of a blockbuster, with its debut being completely overshadowed by the release of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
6
‘Mulan’ (2020)
It would have been incredibly easy to fill this list with films that were directly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as the complete shutdown of theaters transformed many films that would have been blockbuster hits into gargantuan money losers. Easily one of the most prominent was the live-action remake of Mulan, which lost upwards of $141 million, due to not even having a theatrical release in the U.S. Like several other prominent releases of the era, the film instead had a large-scale PVOD release, allowing people to rent the film for $30 on Disney+.
This $30 release was seen as incredibly controversial when the film was first released, both due to its increased price compared to many other premium rentals and the film itself not being worth this price tag. While it’s difficult to tell exactly how much the film earned from these premium online rentals, the pandemic still had a major effect on the film’s attempted theatrical outings in the rest of the world. The only legacy the film has nowadays is as yet another drop in the bucket for Disney’s terrible live-action remakes.
5
‘Missing Link’ (2019)
Image via Laika
Many people are quick to associate the prospects of massive box office bombs with the films themselves being of astronomically low quality, yet Missing Link is an exceptionally charming, award-winning animated film that just did not connect with general audiences at the box office. LAIKA as an animation studio has always placed its artistry first before commercial success, leading to a case such as this, where the most expensive stop-motion animated film of all time only earned $26.6 million at the box office.
The film never had a chance to connect or make an impact with audiences, debuting at #9 at the domestic box office and being massively overshadowed by every other film that was playing in theaters. Its prospects were made even worse when, during its 3rd weekend, any chance of legs were shut out by the release of Avengers: Endgame. However, box-office failure was not the end of Missing Link’s story, as it went on to be nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards and actually won the award at the Golden Globes.
4
‘Chaos Walking’ (2021)
If Mortal Engines was the failed last rallying cry of the YA genre, then Chaos Walking was the far too late whimper of air released from the corpse of the genre’s box-office prospects. This painfully generic dystopian sci-fi film, with the all-star casting lineup of Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, was not only crippled by the pandemic but also went through a myriad of production issues. It was eventually decided that Lionsgate would cut its losses and release this hobbled-together mess of a film, losing $132.3 million and even being a write-down for Lionsgate.
The film itself is about as generic as a dystopian YA film can get, being one of the absolute worst modern sci-fi films and wasting the talents of just about everyone involved. It would have been a box office failure even if it had been released at a more opportune time, yet its brazen release in March 2021 was the final nail in the coffin for any attempt at the film finding box-office success.
3
‘Strange World’ (2022)
The film releases from Walt Disney Animation Studios in the 2020s have acted as a microcosm of the prospects and misaligned prospects of audiences and studios alike. While sequels like Moana 2 and Zootopia 2 grossed billions of dollars, Strange World crashed harder than any other animated film in the studio’s history. The family sci-fi film lost $197 million and ironically got beaten out during its release of Thanksgiving week by Disney’s own Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which released weeks prior.
This friendly fire paints a picture of Disney not having faith in this film to perform at the box office, and possibly even an act of purposeful self-destruction if you’re open to this type of conspiracy (the film did happen to feature Disney’s first LGBTQ+ lead character). However, the fact that the film has completely disappeared from the public eye in the years following its release paints a greater picture of the overall lack of interest that audiences had for this generic, largely boring movie.
2
‘Monster Trucks’ (2016)
Sometimes, one can just look at a film and immediately tell that there is nothing of quality within its filmmaking; all the more shocking is when one of these films has an absurdly high budget that it was never going to earn back. Monster Trucks is one such laughably bad idea, being a family movie that follows a tentacle creature who consumes gasoline and hides inside a car, transforming it into a literal monster truck. This awful family movie somehow managed to have a $125 million budget, causing it to lose hundreds of millions of dollars and be a write-down for Paramount before it even came out.
It’s a strange case where the film was understood to be a cataclysmic financial failure before it even touched the big-screen, placing its very existence into question more and more. The film certainly lived up to its perceived lack of quality and bombed at the box office, still standing as one of the biggest box-office failures that Nickelodeon and Paramount have ever released.
1
‘Mars Needs Moms’ (2011)
Losing hundreds of millions of dollars is one thing, but few films manage to lose so much money that they almost single-handedly shut down the studio that helped bring the film to life. Mars Needs Moms is one such film, whose massive losses not only gave it the reputation of one of the biggest bombs of all time, but also caused the closing of Robert Zemeckis’s mocap animation studio ImageMovers Digital.
Being at the forefront of releasing this type of technically advanced motion capture animation with the likes of Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, this film’s gargantuan failure has eliminated any interest in this method of 3D animation. It’s hard to think of another box-office bomb that has had such an overwhelming and destructive impact upon the industry and the people who created the film, losing hundreds of millions in the process and becoming an icon of utter failure in every regard.
Mars Needs Moms
- Release Date
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March 11, 2011
- Runtime
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98 Minutes
- Director
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Simon Wells
- Writers
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Simon Wells, Wendy Wells
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