When Netflix released their feature film Bird Box in 2018, many viewers were left questioning what the “monster” was that drove everyone to suicide. One of the online theories is that the monster represented “mass hysterical contagion,” nowadays known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), where a single individual suffers a psychogenic illness that spreads to a much larger group.

SEE ALSO: 10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing

Generally, women and girls will succumb to MPI more than men, as they are more likely to be triggered by another affected individual. Unlike the film suggests, nobody has reportedly died from the symptoms, which include hyperventilation, dizziness, panic, faintness, abdominal pain, sickness, headache, weakness, and itching.

These following real-life cases of mass hysterical contagion all ended nearly as quickly as they started. However, the sufferers will not easily forget just how frightening and disturbing such an outbreak can be.

10 The Twitching Teenagers

In October 2011, cheerleading captain Thera Sanchez woke up from a nap to find herself violently twitching and jerking. Two weeks later, a senior from the same school named Lydia Parker began humming and swinging her arms around involuntarily. Eventually, the numbers swelled from two to 20 people (mostly teenage girls) affected at Le Roy Junior/Senior High School, near Buffalo, New York.

Parents were becoming increasingly concerned that the tics were caused by the school’s water supply or that the playing fields were contaminated. However, the country’s leading environmentalists agreed there was nothing that would cause these symptoms.

According to Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, who treated 15 patients at the Dent Neurologic Institute, the symptoms were worsened by social media and press attention. Mechtler explained, “One thing we’ve learned is how social media and mainstream media can worsen the symptoms. The mass hysteria was really fueled by the national media, social media—all this promoted the worsening of symptoms by putting these people at the national forefront.”^[1] By the end of the school term, many of the teenage girls who were affected had returned back to normal.

9 June Bug

In June 1962, 62 workers at a dressmaking textile mill in South Carolina began to show symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and “a breaking out over the body.” The workers believed that the outbreak was caused by bug bites after receiving a fabric shipment.

However, investigation by the US Public Health Service, concluded that there was no reliable evidence that the contagion had been caused by an insect. Instead, it was explained that working conditions in the 1960s were so poor that the stress spread both physically and mentally between coworkers. The “June Bug” itself also could have been manifested by the initial untrained medical staff, who were not familiar with such symptoms.

The June Bug outbreak can also be explained as a social contagion, which is where groups of people who have strong social ties are affected in the same way. The majority of the coworkers were women who were the main providers for their families, which meant spending many long hours together.^[2]

8 Tarantism

In Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, tarantism was a form of hysteria that was associated with a bite from a tarantula. The term is derived from the town of Taranto, Italy. Those who were convinced they had suffered a tarantula bite would experience heightened excitability and restlessness. They would break out into a form of frenzied dancing which would allow them to be “cured.”

In 1693, a doctor in Naples suffered two tarantula bites in order to disprove that they would result in any of the typical tarantism symptoms. In front of six witnesses, he experienced no physical changes.

Tarantism gave rise to the tarantella, in which couples dance quickly and flirtatiously with each other. Composers Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Carl Maria von Weber have all written tarantella music.^[3]

7 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

In 1962, the country of Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika) suffered a laughter epidemic that began with an outbreak at a girl’s school before spreading to the surrounding communities. More than 1,000 people were affected by chronic laughter that lasted several months. Symptoms also included hysterical crying, aimless running, and violent outbursts which could last anywhere between a few hours to more than two weeks. Fourteen schools were closed due to the epidemic.

It is believed that in this particular case, one schoolgirl fell ill with anxiety-induced laughter, which then set off other girls, and a chain reaction occurred throughout the region. Researcher Christian Hempelmann noted, “We build up some magical psychic pressure, and laughter lets us release it. Statistically in this case, this did not release anything. These people were suffering, expressing their suffering through that. Nothing got better because they laughed.”^[4]

6 False Anthrax Alarms

On October 5, 2001, a letter that tested positive for anthrax killed the Sun newspaper’s picture editor Bob Stevens, and the world went berserk. The anthrax antibiotic, Cipro, was one of the fastest-selling drugs on the market, and in Dallas, an airplane was forced to make an emergency landing when potato chips that were crunched into the carpet were mistook for anthrax. In England, Canterbury Cathedral and the London Stock Exchange were evacuated due to false alarms. During the month of the anthrax fatality, there were four letters sent in the US mail that tested positive for anthrax but more than 3,000 cases of both false alarms and hoaxes.

Also during October, newspapers reported huge rises in sales as people were in desperate need of more information, and the media was blamed for overhyping the anthrax threats. Steve Caprus, executive producer of NBC Nightly News, stated that all journalists must “deal with facts—not hyping or being overly dramatic.”^[5] Over the months that followed, five people died from inhaling anthrax, and 17 others were infected after exposure.

5 St. John’s Dance

In 1374, there was an outbreak of uncontrollable dancing in the streets of Aachen, Germany, which still baffles experts even to this day. The writhing of the bodies, sometimes referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” would drive sufferers to exhaustion.

In his 1888 book The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker describes:

They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.^[6]

4 Elsa Perea Flores School

Elsa Perea Flores School in Tarapoto, Peru, fell victim to an outbreak of hysteria affecting nearly 100 children at the school. During the summer of 2016, the children, mostly aged between 11 and 14, claimed they saw terrifying visions of a man in black trying to kill them and also experienced seizures. They experienced fainting attacks, muscular convulsions, delirium, and repeated screaming.

One pupil described her experience, saying, “It’s disturbing for me to think about it. It’s as if someone kept on chasing me from behind. It was a tall man all dressed in black and with a big beard and it felt like he was trying to strangle me.”^[7] Another added, “Several children from different classrooms fainted at the same time. I got nauseous and started vomiting. I heard voices. A man in black chased me and wanted to touch me.” Locals put the hysteria down to demonic possession and claimed that the children must have been playing with an Ouija board before the attacks.

3 Blackburn Fainting Frenzy

During the summer of 1965, more than 300 people in Blackburn, England, began to suddenly faint with no prior symptoms. Princess Margaret was scheduled to visit the newly restored Blackburn Cathedral, and the crowds gathered in their thousands to await her arrival. Then, one by one, people began to collapse on the ground. The ambulance staff who attended the scene said the fainting was due to being stood around in the hot sun.

The following day, 98 pupils at St. Hilda’s Girls’ School also began to suddenly faint without explanation. They were rushed to the hospital, and mattresses were laid out in the hallways to cope with the sudden rise in patients. One ambulance driver recalled, “As fast as we took them away, new cases from classrooms in other parts of the school were being brought in.”^[8]

A year later, a report in the British Medical Journal by a pediatrician and a London psychologist confirmed that this was a case a mass hysteria or, as noted, an “epidemic of over-breathing.”

2 Resignation Syndrome

A mystery illness observed in Sweden has been dubbed “resignation syndrome.” Children of asylum-seekers would withdraw completely, unable to open their eyes, speak, or even walk. Eventually, they did recover, but the illness baffled medical experts for more than two decades. Dr. Elisabeth Hultcrantz, a volunteer with Doctors of the World, revealed, “When I explain to the parents what has happened, I tell them the world has been so terrible that [their child] has gone into herself and disconnected the conscious part of her brain.”

Resignation syndrome was first reported in the 1990s. From 2003 to 2005, more than 400 cases were noted. Karl Sallin, a pediatrician at the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, said, “To our knowledge, no cases have been established outside of Sweden.” More recently, in 2016, Sweden’s National Board of Health stated that numbers had decreased; there were 169 cases that year.^[9]

1 Coca-Cola Scare

In June 1999, Coca-Cola withdrew 30 million cans and bottles from the shelves in Belgium after more than 100 people claimed the product made them ill. It was reported throughout the country that many people, including children, became suddenly sick with “stomach cramps, nausea, headaches and palpitations” after drinking bottled Coca-Cola. After the Belgian government was swamped with complaints from citizens concerned about airborne toxins, an investigation took place. However, four members of Belgium’s Health Council suggested that the epidemic was a case of mass hysteria.

In a public letter, the health council stated, “It is probably significant that a company with such high visibility and symbolic image was involved in this episode. Besides the important role of the media, the scale of the outbreak may have been amplified by the radical measures taken by the health authorities, as well as deficient communication by the Coca-Cola company.”^[10] Coca-Cola quickly recovered from the epidemic, and sales were back on the rise within weeks of the event.

Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. Can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 5’2″ or at home reading true crime magazines.
Twitter: @thecheish

The media will tell you that the communal cultural experience of going to see a movie in a theater is on its way out. While the budgets of the biggest films are going up and up, over the course of 2019 American box office revenue was down five percent. While 2018 had been up one percent, 2017 was a 25 year low. This trend towards stagnation means an ever increasing likelihood that movies will crash and burn at the box office. Let’s have a look through the wreckage…

10. Cats (2019)

Loss: $71,000,000

This adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 stage production had a rocky introduction to the public. That is to say that audiences didn’t so much find Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper’s whimsical visions of people imitating stray cats charming so much as they found it uncomfortably uncanny from the premiere of the trailer on July 18, 2019 on. Of course, even if an ideal balance between cat and human anatomy had been found for the characters, such as using animation (as Steven Spielberg wanted to do in the ’90s), the movie wouldn’t necessarily have had good prospects. Even back when the original premiered, the New York Times bashed Cats for not having “an idea in its head” and that it only “vaguely” attempted a story. Audiences tend to like some plot in even the most idea-free stories, which made the decision to throw $96 million into this production all the more puzzling. 

With seemingly everything stacked against it and toxic test audience reception, even $115 million in advertising couldn’t save it. It opened to $6.6 million in the US on December 20, 2019, and its legs/overseas numbers were so bad that a loss of $71 million was assured. With surprising slowness, Universal read the room and withdrew the disaster from Oscar contention. Still, as unsuccessful as it was as a family musical, Cats will probably live for decades as a cult horror spectacle. 

9. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Loss: $80,000,000

No one was expecting a Star Wars movie to lose money. Since 1977, every Star Wars movie had been highly lucrative, no matter how much it had been attacked by both fans and critics. Even that 2008 animated film The Clone Wars, much cheaper than even the original film after 31 years of inflation and more critically condemned than the punching bag of a movie The Phantom Menace, made more than eight times its budget. So what made this movie based on the origin of one of the most popular characters in the franchise lose Disney money, even at a time when every Disney Star Wars film before and since made more than a billion?

A big part of the problem was a troubled production. The original writer/director team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired part way through production and replaced with Ron Howard, meaning that a huge percentage of the movie was very expensively reshot. It was such a hectic situation that rumors started regarding Alden Ehrenreich supposedly needing an acting coach, although Ehrenreich was adamant to Vanity Fair that the truth was the directors had brought a friend on the production who consulted for the entire cast. Solo also came out only five months after the critically acclaimed but audience-dividing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which left very little time for anticipation for the new movie to build up. 

8. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Loss: $83,000,000

Despite its obscurity with mainstream audiences, this film at least had some pedigree with the science fiction crowd. Based on the 1969 French comic strip Valerian and Laureline by Jean-Claude Mézières, it either very heavily influenced the art design of the Star Wars original trilogy or bore a staggeringly coincidental resemblance, down from the designs of planets to costumes and plot points (such as putting a character in suspended animation in metal). Luc Besson was relatively hot off his 2014 hit Lucy when the trailer for Valerian was released, so the possibility of a success was there for the $180 million spectacle. 

When the film premiered in America to a weak $17 million and test audiences giving it a relatively dismal B-, many fingers were pointed at the casting as the cause for failure. Neither star Dane DeHaan or Cara Delevigne were particularly tall stars, so their relatively similar heights and facial features gave many audience members the subconscious feeling that the romantic leads looked related. Their performances were also criticized for a lack of chemistry and general woodenness. Really though, what actor could deliver dialogue like, “If you don’t help me find Valerian, this bullet is going to find you” convincingly? We have unusually precise numbers for how many people lost their jobs over it. Besson’s production company Eurocorp laid off 22 people, a bit above a quarter of its personnel, in the wake of the release.  

7. Town & Country (2001) 

Loss: $90,000,000

This movie was not supposed to be a huge production. Originally it was planned to be a relatively modest 1998 release with a budget of only about $45 million. After all, it’s not a spectacle film. It’s a relationship comedy about star Warren Beatty’s character cheating on his wife, and Gary Shandling’s character coming to terms with his homosexuality. So why did the result more than double its budget, get delayed by three years, and end up so bad that the studio never screened it for critics? 

According to Michael DeLuca, who greenlit and produced the project for New Line Cinema, the central problem was that the movie began production without a finished script. Hence there were numerous rewrites, reshoots, and the story had no momentum. Even screenwriting legend Buck Henry of The Graduate fame couldn’t fix the script. So it was that this $90 million movie with about $10 million in advertising grossed only about enough to cover its marketing budget. It was the last time Warren Beatty received significant media attention until an Academy Awards show in 2017 that was only slightly less disastrous.   

6. A Wrinkle in Time (2018) 

Loss: $100,000,000

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 Newberry Award-winning novel about the Wallace children traveling through space to save their physicist father from a giant brain has a troubled relationship with the Walt Disney Company. In 1975 Disney attempted to adapt it and abandoned the project. Even worse was in 2003, because there they succeeded and made the embarrassingly cheesy and rushed TV movie of the book, which the author bashed in an interview. Finally in 2018 the story got to inflict its final damage on Disney when its March release failed spectacularly despite performances by such stars as Oprah Winfrey. 

Why the failure? Potentially, part of the problem is that the story is just not the kind that’s suitable for motion picture adaptation, since it doesn’t fit neatly into a three act structure. Also, considering the story is the kind where a tesseract (the bending of space time as a means of conveyance similar to the method used in Frank Herbert’s Dune) is explained at length, it’s not really the kind of film with room for pulse-pounding action or whimsy, although critics like Tasha Robinson of Vulture magazine went after it for being childish anyway.   

It could also be argued that director Ava DuVernay wasn’t a good fit for the production. Her prior largest project was the relatively modest 2014 Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma, which at $20 million had a budget less than a fifth of the one she managed for Disney. Most of her work was also socially conscious dramas and documentaries with tones vastly different than kid-friendly fantasy. It’ll no doubt be awhile before she ever gets hired to make another film like this, and it seems unlikely she’ll even want the gig.  

5. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)

Loss: $125,000,000

This is not usually included in lists of legendary movie bombs, if for no other reason than people don’t seem remember it ever existed. It’s certainly not a movie that lacks pedigree. It was made by DreamWorks and stars Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Michelle Pfeiffer. The plot of Sinbad needing to retrieve the Book of Peace is pretty straight-forward, and the quality of the animation has been praised. It also received mixed to decent reviews, with Roger Ebert for one giving it three and a half stars out of four. 

Unfortunately, it had the rotten luck of coming out at the same time that Pirates of the Caribbean was redefining the pirate movie paradigm. It also was a 2D movie at a time when 3D movies were becoming fashionable. Thus it joined Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. in the ranks of Early Aughts cartoons that were just barely behind-the-times enough to lose tens of millions of dollars. 

4. Monster Trucks (2017) 

Loss: $125,000,000 

The first thing audiences heard about this movie about monsters hidden under truck hoods that function as engines was that even before it was released, Paramount’s financials revealed that they expected to lose $115,000,000 on it. The second thing that they heard was that the story for the movie had been literally inspired by Paramount president Adam Goodman’s four year-old son. Not the most encouraging of news. 

Adding to this movie’s problems was the fact the main monster Creech was initially so terrifyingly designed that it made children in test audiences scream. Rerendering it into a more “ugly cute” design cost tens of millions of dollars. That helped explain why this movie, which sounds like a combination of a kids cartoon from Nickelodeon in the ’90s and E.T., had its budget climb to $125,000,000. No wonder the studio ended up pushing its release back around two years. Add all that together, and it’s not surprising that it turned out losing $115,000,000 was actually a highly optimistic projection of how bad this project was for Paramount, as it was about ten million short of the real figure. 

3. King Arthur Legend of the Sword (2017)

Loss: $150,000,000

Guy Ritchie is probably still best known as the U.K.’s answer to Quentin Tarantino, in terms of highly stylized gangster movies, so he might seem like an odd fit for a medieval fantasy story. Of course, to many he had seemed like an awkward fit for the Sherlock Holmes films, and those made bank. Plus in this Warner Brothers movie Arthur starts out as a street tough who has to fight his way to the throne, playing more to Ritchie’s style. The fact the actor playing Arthur was Charlie Hunnam, who to this day is still best known for playing Jax on the TV show Sons of Anarchy, was not too encouraging, but it hardly ensured doom. 

Critics were consistent that what did the movie in was editing choices. For example, characters are introduced complete with backstories long after they’ve already been part of the action. Monsters are added near the end without set up, let alone explanation. The fights are often too choppy to follow the action properly and get excited by it. Still, at least Guy Ritchie’s abilities served him well enough for 2019’s Aladdin remake to be a smash hit, so he seemed to take the editing lessons of this film to heart. 

2. Mortal Engines (2018)

Loss: $175,000,000

This was not a cash grab or a trend chase. Producer Peter Jackson wanted to adapt the young adult novels of Philip Reeve, featuring cities on gigantic tank treads, to the big screen since at least 2011, but he put that project on hold for five years to make the Hobbit trilogy for Warner Brothers. By 2015, he was still so burned out that he handed the job of directing the adaptation to Christian Rivers, a second unit director for the Middle Earth films. The Mortal Engines books were more niche than they were mainstream hits, and yet even their fanbase had to put up with a change in aesthetics of the book from steampunk to modern, and for the protagonists to be aged up. Universal also had the issue that the leads were not major stars, with the highest profile performer being Hugo Weaving filling in the villain role.   

Unfortunately for Universal this movie came at a time when the post-apocalyptic young adult film genre was out of fashion. Critics bashed the film for being overly derivative, and audiences couldn’t work up substantially more enthusiasm, either. At least Peter Jackson had the consolation of his simultaneously released film They Shall Not Grow Old becoming a critical darling and, despite being composed largely of World War I archival footage, grossing more in the US ($17.9 million) than his mega-budget passion project ($15.9 million). 

1. John Carter (2012)

Loss: $200,000,000

There have been attempts to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs’s landmark sci-fi story A Princess of Mars to the big screen since 1938. John Carpenter had been developing a John Carter of Mars movie for years. Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton chose the project, bringing 30 years of love for the source material and enough Pixar clout that his demands of no executive interference were met. 

Warning signs began flashing when the studio requested footage for the first teaser trailer. Stanton had not scheduled his shoot for the “epic” shots to be completed first, a mistake attributed to Stanton’s inexperience with live action. It left mostly footage that played up the movie’s romance, thus lessening the impact for many viewers’ first impression of the movie. 

In interviews, Stanton admitted he had wildly overestimated just how prominent John Carter was in the public imagination. While the story was extremely influential, it had been imitated so much in the decades since its publication that John Carter himself felt like a knockoff. So even as the production scrambled to cobble together footage to sell the movie’s scale, it backfired so badly that a Super Bowl ad actually lessened interest in the movie among test audiences. If nothing else, John Carter and many of the other movies on this list are painful lessons that sometimes if a project is long in Development Hell everyone should just learn to let it go. 

Dustin Koski cowrote A Tale of Magic Gone Wrong, a book about fairies that have to save their village after everyone turned into monsters.

Despite what Disney and Marvel would have us believe with the MCU, there’s no magic formula for making box office gold. Everyone who makes a movie fully expects it to succeed and do well, but sometimes that’s not in the cards. While there are some movies that are critically maligned and do poorly overall, when a high-budget movie fails miserably the losses can be staggering.

10. The Adventures of Pluto Nash Lost $96 million

If you don’t recall Eddie Murphy’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash you’re in good company. The 2002 film cost over $100 million to make and it was a massive science fiction comedy extravaganza. Or at least that’s how they described it, since barely anyone actually went to see it. It grossed a paltry $7 million at the box office.

The movie is so bad that even its star Eddie Murphy claims trying to watch it causes him to weep openly. It’s one thing for critics to savage a movie, and Pluto Nash has a dismal 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it’s quite another when even the star admits that the whole movie was absolutely terrible. 

Because movie budgets are a little tricky to wrap your head around, and they also factor in things like marketing costs on top of it as well as adjusting for inflation, at least one source claims that the total loss for Pluto Nash tops $130 million. 

9. Stealth lost $96 million

In 2005 anyone probably would have thought a movie in which Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx have to tangle with artificially intelligent killer fighter jets would have been a good idea, right? That’s a big yes and no.

The studio that financed the movie for $135 million definitely thought it was a good idea. Audiences who didn’t actually go see the movie did not.  With a healthy marketing budget that was really trying to push it, when it managed to pull in $77 million at the box office it wasn’t as small a loss as the budget makes it seem. All told, it’s estimated that the movie lost about $96 million. 

Stealth sits at 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert called it a dumbed down Top Gun. If you recall, no one ever claimed Top Gun was very smart in the first place. 

8. 47 Ronin Lost $98 million

The Keanu Reeves movie 47 Ronin is what is known in Japan as a Chushingura. It’s a fictionalized account of the real-life events surrounding 47 masterless samurai, known as ronin, who sought to avenge the death of their master.

The story has been made into a film no less than six times but never was the story as big and extravagant as when Keanu starred in it back in 2013. It had a staggering $175 million budget, the highest ever for a debut director. And in a very telling sign, the movie sat on the shelf for two years after it was produced. That’s never good.

47 Ronin lost an estimated $98 million and the blame has been put, in part, on Carl Rinsch and his first time directing chops. It only has 16% on Rotten Tomatoes and many critics accused it of being both boring and cliche. 

7. Lone Ranger Lost $190 million

There are a number of movies that have been called cursed over the years. Poltergeist was one such movie, famously said to be cursed from the first installment through to the third of the series. The Lone Ranger is another film which definitely deserves to be considered for that honor, assuming you believe in such things.

The production of The Lone Ranger was hampered by numerous problems. It suffered delays as well as massive budgetary issues. At one point the budget had reached almost $300 million, and Disney had to shut down production to retool everything. That resulted in some cuts to special effects and other parts of the budget until it was scaled back to a lean, mean $215 million.

There were accidents on set with the stunt people involved, and a crew member even drowned during the production. Disney was fined $60,000 for safety violations and some inclement weather destroyed sets and cost even more money on the budget.

When the film was finally released and the bad reviews rolled in, the result was Disney chalking the movie up to $190 million loss.

6. Mars Needs Moms Lost $111 million 

In 2011, Mars Needs Moms seemed like a sure thing. The legendary Robert Zemeckis, who was responsible for iconic movies like Forrest Gump and Back to the Future, produced the motion-capture animation. The film itself was based on a book by writer and cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. It almost seemed worth the $150 million budget.

When you factor in marketing it’s believed that Disney probably invested about $200 million in this movie. Which is why when, on its opening weekend, it only pulled in $6.9 million people started to get worried. The final gross of the film was about $39 million, which means lost anywhere from $111 million to $161 million, depending on which numbers you want to work with. 

Rubbing salt in the wound, when it was released overseas it somehow made even less money: only $2.1 million throughout 14 countries. The question needs to be asked then, how did the movie that had so much talent behind it end up failing so miserably? The problem may have been in the execution.

Mars Needs Moms used motion capture technology, the kind of stuff we as audiences really took a shine to with characters like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, or the Na’vi from the movie Avatar. The problem was the way it was used in Mars Needs Moms was less cool, and what at least one person described as creepy. 

5. Titan AE Potentially Lost $120 Million on a $85 Million Budget

On paper, the animated film Titan AE looked bulletproof. Director Don Bluth, who created classics like The Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time, and An American Tail was helming a sci-fi animated film featuring the voice talents of Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman and many other well known stars.

Behind the scenes, things were pretty ugly during the production of the movie. For starters, Don Bluth was not the original director. The film was already $30 million into the production before the original director was fired and Bluth was hired alongside Gary Goldman. According to Goldman, the initial $30 million was used to do some pre-production art and nothing else. 

The movie blended traditional 2D animation with 3D animation, which didn’t seem to be a conscious choice from the get go. According to Goldman, they just abandoned the 2D idea halfway through production and finished it with 3D because that’s what was new and cool at the time. 

The movie ended up losing somewhere between $70 million and $120 million on an $85 million budget. It also saw the head of Fox Studios fired by Rupert Murdoch, and the closing of their Phoenix Animation Studio, which had produced two major bombs including the earlier animated film Anastasia.

4. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas Lost $125 million

Proving that there are no guarantees with animated movies no matter how much effort goes into them, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas bombed like a case of Molotov cocktails. The film was produced by DreamWorks Studios, and featured voice acting from Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Michelle Pfeiffer. That all sounds great in theory, but the reality was not.

For unknown reasons, Sinbad was turned into a Sicilian in this movie, completely ignoring the source material, which was just one of several issues. According to DreamWorks, the budget for Sinbad was $60 million. That number should be looked at with a bit of skepticism, as the former head of DreamWorks David Geffen said in an interview that the movie actually lost the studio $125 million. No amount of advertising budget can more than double the losses of a movie, so DreamWorks may have been playing a little fast and loose with their numbers, or their co-founder Geffen just had no idea what he was talking about. 

The movie had extensive marketing tie-ins with Baskin-Robbins, Hasbro, M&Ms and more. When it debuted, it didn’t even out-gross Finding Nemo, which had already been in theaters for six weeks. 

3. Cutthroat Island Lost $147 million

It’s not often that a movie does so poorly it kills an entire genre of film, but that’s what Cutthroat Island seemed to do. The Renny Harlin directed movie, starring Geena Davis in a swashbuckling adventure, did so poorly Hollywood didn’t make another pirate movie for over a decade. 

It can’t be overstated just how awful this movie’s whole legacy is. The budget for Cutthroat Island was $115 million back in 1995. Its box office take was $10 million. This was so bad, it actually made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest financial loss in film history at the time. When you adjusted for inflation today, you’re looking at a loss of $147 million.

The IMDb facts page for the movie reads like a rogue’s gallery of bad ideas and terrible mistakes. One actor was fired for getting drunk and mooning Geena Davis. Star Matthew Modine explained that some of the budget went for the shipping of dozens and dozens of cases of V8 for the director to drink on set. They had to be shipped from the United States to Malta, and apparently an entire room of the vegetable juice was left at the end of filming. On top of that, three cameras were used to film every single shot which resulted in massive amounts of unused film at the end of production. 

Harlin is said to have fired the chief camera operator from the set, which resulted in dozens of other crew members quitting in solidarity. The blame can’t solely be put on Harlin’s shoulders though, as he tried to quit production realizing just how bad the movie was going to be, as did Geena Davis. The studio refused to stop production. 

2. Gemini Man Lost $111 million

Betting on Will Smith is usually a smart choice when it comes to Hollywood. Many of his early films were massive blockbusters, like Independence Day and Men in Black. Everyone has a miss once in a while though, and Smith definitely missed the mark with his 2019 sci-fi flick Gemini Man.

Estimates place Gemini Man‘s losses at around $111 million. A number of factors seem to have come together to make the movie fail so badly. For starters, it was filmed at 120 frames per second for a 3D release. High frame-rate movies like that have a curious effect on audiences. 

While it seems like higher frame rate and crisper detail should make a movie a more exciting and interesting experience for viewers, what happens is the movie becomes so real and clean looking it removes some of the magic and glamor we expect from movies. While it’s hard to define, the result is that audiences just don’t like the way it looks. 

The other problem with the movie was that the storyline was pretty generic and not interesting. It wasn’t necessarily a bad movie, but being so run-of-the-mill and then having so many reviews dominated by the technological aspects of the high-frame-rate meant that no one was really trying hard to sell the movie. 

1. Terminator: Dark Fate Lost $120 million 

The Terminator franchise is one of the most unusual in film history. The first one made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, proved James Cameron as a blockbuster filmmaker, and started the ball rolling on one of cinema’s most famous characters. 10 years later when we got Terminator 2 it became one of those rare times when a sequel surpasses the original. And then things took a turn.

Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genisys were all fairly underwhelming at the box office and for critics. But then James Cameron returned to the franchise with Dark Fate and brought series star Linda Hamilton back as well. It felt like a recipe to take us right back to the legendary status of T2: Judgment Day. Or at least that’s what it seemed like at first. 

Dark Fate opened at $29 million at the domestic box office. Respectable numbers for a low budget film, but not for something of this caliber. The budget for Dark Fate was estimated at somewhere around $185 million. In order to break even the movie needed to make about $450 million. That put the movie on track to lose a staggering $120 million overall.

Despite having the original director and cast back, and even being critically praised for being the best film in the franchise since Terminator 2, it seems that audiences had just had enough of Terminator after so many bad movies in a row.