What makes a movie a hit versus a flop? Is it the marketing budget, the star power, or perhaps the timing of its release? When you look at these 10 brilliant films, you’ll see that box‑office performance often has little to do with the actual quality of the picture. Each of these titles stumbled financially at first, only to win over audiences later on.

Why These 10 Brilliant Films Flopped Yet Found Fans

10. The Big Lebowski (1998)

You’d assume that any Coen Brothers project would be a sure bet, given their track record of instant classics like No Country for Old Men and Fargo. Yet their laid‑back, off‑beat comedy The Big Lebowski barely made a ripple when it first hit theaters, despite boasting a star‑studded cast.

The story follows the hapless Dude (Jeff Bridges) as he gets tangled in a kidnapping scheme, and the film only managed roughly $18 million on a $15 million budget. While not the deepest disaster on our list, it fell far short of studio expectations. A lackluster trailer and tepid early reviews didn’t help, but the film’s endlessly quotable dialogue, quirky humor, and endearing anti‑hero eventually turned it into a beloved cult favorite once it hit home video.

9. Treasure Planet (2002)

Directors Ron Clements and John Musker spent nearly two decades pitching Treasure Planet, only to be turned down three times before Disney finally green‑lit the space‑age retelling of Treasure Island. Despite their pedigree with hits like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, the movie flopped spectacularly upon release.

It earned just $109.6 million worldwide against a $140 million production budget, prompting Disney to cancel any planned sequel. The misfire can be blamed on a crowded fall season dominated by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and a growing audience preference for CGI‑heavy animation. Still, the film dazzles with its imaginative visuals, space‑surfing thrills, and a likable protagonist, making it a hidden gem for those who give it a second look.

8. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Edgar Wright’s kinetic adaptation of the graphic‑novel series follows slacker musician Scott (Michael Cera) as he battles his girlfriend’s exes in a video‑game‑style showdown. Though it later inspired an anime spin‑off, the movie initially missed the mark financially.

With a budget estimated between $60 million and $80 million, it only scraped about $50 million worldwide. The film’s hyper‑stylized humor and rapid‑fire editing proved difficult to capture in a conventional trailer, likely hindering its box‑office draw. Nonetheless, a stellar ensemble—including Kieran Culkin, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Brie Larson, and Chris Evans—has helped the film gain the recognition it deserved over time.

7. Donnie Darko (2001)

Richard Kelly’s mind‑bending debut blends atmospheric visuals, a tangled plot, and themes ranging from 1980s politics to mental illness and wormholes. Released just a month after the September 11 attacks, its central plane‑crash motif made studios wary of promoting it.

Consequently, the film slipped through theaters with minimal fanfare, leaving many unaware of its existence. It later resurfaced on home video and streaming platforms, where its cult following blossomed, cementing its status as a modern classic.

6. Heathers (1989)

Heathers chronicles Veronica (Winona Ryder), an outcast who infiltrates the most popular clique at her high school, only to discover its toxic, bullying core. When she meets the enigmatic J.D. (Christian Slater), their partnership spirals into darkly comic chaos.

Though the film’s biting satire and razor‑sharp script earned critical praise, it was never crafted for mainstream appeal. Even Ryder’s agent warned her against taking the role, fearing it could damage her career. The movie earned merely £1.1 million on a £3 million budget, but its razor‑edged humor eventually secured a devoted cult following.

5. The Iron Giant (1999)

Adapted from Ted Hughes’s 1968 novel, The Iron Giant tells the touching story of young Hogarth and a massive alien robot the U.S. military wants to destroy. Directed by Brad Bird—later known for Ratatouille and The Incredibles—the film received strong critical acclaim yet struggled to attract theatergoers.

It grossed only $31.3 million worldwide against a $50 million budget. One factor was its departure from the classic Disney formula; the movie eschewed musical numbers, princes, and fairy‑tale tropes for a Cold‑War‑era setting. Additionally, Warner Bros., still reeling from the flop of Quest for Camelot, hesitated to invest heavily in advertising.

Only after the film entered the home‑video market did Warner Bros. recognize its value, launching a robust promotional push that, combined with word‑of‑mouth buzz, finally earned the animated masterpiece the admiration it deserved.

4. Fight Club (1999)

Today, Fight Club is synonymous with cultural impact—who doesn’t know the first two, often‑broken, rules? Yet when it premiered, 20th Century Fox labeled it “a film for no one,” and it dramatically underperformed.

The movie earned $37 million domestically on a $65 million budget, barely recouping its costs worldwide. Both star Edward Norton and director David Fincher later critiqued the studio’s marketing missteps. An unnamed Fox executive even claimed, “men don’t want to see Brad Pitt with his shirt off; it makes them feel bad. And women don’t want to see him bloody. So I don’t know who you made this movie for.”

3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Andrew Dominik’s revisionist western originally aimed to be a three‑hour epic slated for 2006, but studio‑mandated edits trimmed its runtime and delayed its release until September 2007.

Despite glowing reviews and an all‑star cast, the film earned a meager $4 million domestically against a $30 million production budget, with a worldwide total of roughly $15 million—far from enough to offset costs. Nevertheless, a passionate fanbase organized “Jesse James Revival” re‑releases, keeping the film alive in the public consciousness.

2. Blade Runner (1982) & Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

The original 1982 neo‑noir masterpiece paired Ridley Scott with Harrison Ford, fresh from the successes of Alien and Star Wars. Yet its deliberate pacing, dystopian vibe, and philosophical depth proved a tough sell for audiences craving laser battles.

While not an outright financial disaster, the film’s modest box‑office returns only grew into a cult classic years later. The sequel, Blade Runner 2049, faced a similar uphill battle, initially prompting studios to consider scrapping it. Ultimately, both films earned reverence as modern cult icons, proving that visionary storytelling can outlive immediate earnings.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

Orson Welles’s groundbreaking debut—where he also starred and co‑wrote—has long been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Yet in the 1940s, it struggled to recoup its costs and quickly slipped from public view.

A major obstacle was media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who recognized himself in the film’s fictionalized portrayal and consequently banned it from his newspapers, stifling early promotion.

It wasn’t until the 1950s, when late‑night television began airing the picture and critics worldwide reevaluated its artistry, that Citizen Kane rose to legendary status, now regularly topping prestigious “greatest‑of‑all‑time” lists.

When Netflix dropped the thriller Bird Box in 2018, audiences were left wondering about the unseen monster that drove people to suicide. One popular theory points to mass hysterical contagion—now known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI)—where a single case spreads like a psychological wildfire. Below, we count down 10 disturbing cases of MPI that shocked communities, illustrating how fear, media, and social pressure can turn ordinary moments into collective nightmares.

10 Disturbing Cases of Mass Hysteria

10 The Twitching Teenagers

In October 2011, Thera Sanchez, the cheerleading captain at Le Roy Junior/Senior High School near Buffalo, New York, awoke from a nap only to discover she was uncontrollably twitching and jerking. Two weeks later, senior Lydia Parker began humming and swinging her arms erratically. What started as a duo soon ballooned to about 20 students—mostly teenage girls—exhibiting similar involuntary movements.

Parents grew frantic, suspecting the school’s water or playing fields were contaminated. Yet leading environmental experts found no evidence of any toxin that could cause such symptoms.

Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, who treated 15 of the affected teens at the Dent Neurologic Institute, noted that social media and press attention amplified the outbreak. He 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.” By the end of the term, most of the girls had returned to normal.

9 June Bug

In June 1962, a South Carolina dress‑making mill saw 62 workers develop nausea, dizziness, and a rash that seemed to “break out over the body.” The staff blamed a recent fabric shipment, believing insect bites were to blame.

Investigations by the U.S. Public Health Service uncovered no credible evidence of an insect vector. Instead, they concluded that the harsh working conditions of the era—combined with the stress of long hours—had created a fertile ground for a psychosomatic spread. The term “June Bug” likely emerged from an early, untrained medical team unfamiliar with such symptom clusters.

This episode exemplifies a social contagion, where tightly knit groups—here, mostly women supporting families—share stress‑induced symptoms that echo each other.

8 Tarantism

From the 15th to the 17th century in Italy, tarantism described a bizarre hysteria linked to alleged tarantula bites. Victims—convinced they’d been stung—experienced heightened excitability and restlessness, often breaking into frenetic dancing believed to be a cure.

In 1693, a Naples physician deliberately allowed two tarantula bites to test the theory. In front of six witnesses, he displayed no physical changes, debunking the notion that the spider’s venom caused the symptoms.

The phenomenon gave birth to the tarantella, a rapid, flirtatious couple’s dance. Renowned composers such as Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Carl Maria von Weber all penned tarantella pieces, immortalizing the feverish rhythm of the era.

7 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

In 1962, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) experienced a contagious laughter outbreak that began at a girls’ school and quickly spread to neighboring villages. Over 1,000 individuals suffered bouts of uncontrollable giggling that lasted weeks, accompanied by hysterical crying, aimless running, and violent outbursts lasting from a few hours to more than two weeks. Fourteen schools were forced to close.

Researchers believe a single schoolgirl, anxious and prone to laughter, triggered the chain reaction. Christian Hempelmann observed, “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.”

6 False Anthrax Alarms

On October 5, 2001, a letter that tested positive for anthrax claimed the life of the Sun newspaper’s picture editor, Bob Stevens, sending shockwaves worldwide. The anthrax antibiotic Cipro surged in sales, and an airplane in Dallas was forced to land when carpet crumbs were mistaken for anthrax spores. In England, both Canterbury Cathedral and the London Stock Exchange were evacuated over false alarms.

During that month, four letters tested positive for anthrax, yet more than 3,000 cases turned out to be hoaxes or false alarms. Media outlets saw a massive spike in sales as the public craved information, prompting criticism that journalists were hyping the threat. Steve Caprus, executive producer of NBC Nightly News, urged reporters to “deal with facts—not hyping or being overly dramatic.” Over subsequent months, five people died from inhaling anthrax, and 17 others were infected.

5 St. John’s Dance

In 1374, the streets of Aachen, Germany, were seized by an inexplicable dancing mania, later dubbed “St. John’s Dance.” Sufferers formed circles, hand‑in‑hand, dancing wildly for hours on end until exhaustion forced them to collapse. They reported extreme oppression and groaning as if in agony, only to recover after being tightly swathed around the waist.

Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker chronicled the phenomenon in his 1888 work The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, describing the relentless, delirious choreography that baffled observers for centuries.

4 Elsa Perea Flores School

In the summer of 2016, the Elsa Perea Flores School in Tarapoto, Peru, fell prey to a mass hysteria episode that afflicted nearly 100 children aged 11‑14. Students reported terrifying visions of a tall, bearded man dressed in black who seemed intent on strangling them, accompanied by seizures, fainting, muscular convulsions, delirium, and repeated screaming.

One pupil recounted, “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.” 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 attributed the outbreak to demonic possession, speculating that the children had been playing with a Ouija board prior to the attacks.

3 Blackburn Fainting Frenzy

During the summer of 1965, over 300 residents of Blackburn, England, suddenly fainted without warning. The incident coincided with Princess Margaret’s scheduled visit to the newly restored Blackburn Cathedral, drawing massive crowds that gathered in the scorching sun. One by one, people collapsed, and ambulance crews attributed the fainting to heat‑induced over‑breathing.

The following day, 98 pupils at St. Hilda’s Girls’ School also experienced abrupt fainting spells. Hospitals were inundated, and mattresses were strewn throughout school hallways to accommodate the influx. An ambulance driver recalled, “As fast as we took them away, new cases from classrooms in other parts of the school were being brought in.”

A year later, a British Medical Journal report by a pediatrician and a London psychologist confirmed the phenomenon as a case of mass hysteria, describing it as an “epidemic of over‑breathing.”

2 Resignation Syndrome

In Sweden, a puzzling condition known as “resignation syndrome” has haunted children of asylum‑seekers for decades. Affected youngsters withdraw completely—unable to open their eyes, speak, or even walk—entering a state of profound catatonia. Dr. Elisabeth Hultcrantz, a volunteer with Doctors of the World, explained, “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.”

The syndrome first surfaced in the 1990s, with over 400 cases recorded between 2003 and 2005. Pediatrician Karl Sallin of the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital noted, “To our knowledge, no cases have been established outside of Sweden.” By 2016, Sweden’s National Board of Health reported a decline, documenting 169 cases that year.

1 Coca‑Cola Scare

In June 1999, Belgium witnessed a massive panic when more than 100 citizens reported illness after drinking bottled Coca‑Cola. Symptoms ranged from stomach cramps and nausea to headaches and palpitations. The government responded by pulling 30 million cans and bottles from shelves.

An investigation by Belgium’s Health Council concluded the episode was a classic case of mass hysteria. In a public letter, council members wrote, “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.”

Despite the scare, Coca‑Cola rebounded quickly, with sales returning to normal within weeks.

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.