Post by lugnut on Apr 8, 2012 23:17:40 GMT -5
10. Stealth (2005)
In the year 2016, the Navy develops a super-intelligent unmanned aircraft called “Edi.” When Edi gets struck by lightning, he stops taking orders and almost starts World War III.
In the year 2005, nobody cared. Despite being helmed by Rob Cohen, director of the blockbusters The Fast and The Furious and xXx, Stealth was a dud — losing $111,700,123 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
9. Heaven's Gate (1980)
After the critical and commercial success of 1978’s The Deer Hunter, director Michael Cimino was given carte blanche for his next film, Heaven’s Gate. Cimino took the studio’s money and ran with it, funneling cash into his compulsive attention to detail and more than 1.5 million feet of film. Cimino and United Artists famously and publicly clashed over the production of the film, and the director reportedly kept armed guards outside the editing room to keep execs from fussing with his vision. When all was said and done, critics despised the film, and the fans didn’t come out to see it either. As Vincent Canby of The New York Times put it, the film, “fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” Inflation-adjusted, the film lost a whopping $114,281,677.
8. Speed Racer (2008)
This special effects-laden remake of a 1960’s Japanese anime series cost its studio,Warner Bros., a staggering $200 million to make and promote. Though the film didn’t fare as badly with critics or fans as some of the other movies on the list, those costs were just far too high to overcome. The special effects, which won over fans from Quentin Tarantino to TIME’s Richard Corliss, may have just been too much for the real target audience of the film: little kids. As one father told Variety, the trailer was “sensory overload” for his 12 and 7-year-old sons. Failing to bring out that key demographic lost Warner Bros. $114,479,584 in 2012 dollars.
7. Town & Country (2001)
Seemingly every summer, Hollywood turns out another farce centered around teenagers and their quest for sexual fulfillment. Town & Country turned that trope on its head, instead making a movie about middle-aged men and their quest for sexual fulfillment (and trying to prevent their wives from finding out). Though it featured such megastars as Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Gary Shandling, the film meandered and failed to bring in movie fans. With a total budget of $105 million, the film grossed just over $10 million worldwide. Inflation adjusted, Town & Country’s losses come in at $124,202,203.
6. The 13th Warrior (1999)
Michael Crichton’s novels (Jurassic Park, Congo) were transformed into many a blockbuster hit, so when Touchstone Pictures decided to produce a renamed film version of The Eaters of the Dead with John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard) at the helm, they were certain they had banked a hit. Once test audiences were brought in to view the film, however, the studio had second thoughts. They spent big bucks to rework the film, to no avail. The final product was so bad that Omar Sharif, who had a small part in the film, actually retired briefly from acting because of his poor opinion of it. Said Sharif, “After my small role in The 13th Warrior, I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well’ . . . bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.”
5. Mars Needs Moms (2011)
One of the reasons the John Carter debacle doesn’t look as bad for Walt Disney is that just one year ago the studio was mourning the epic bomb Mars Needs Moms. Inflation adjusted, this motion-capture animated film lost $140,513,991, making the John Carter loss appear better from a quarter-over-quarter revenue growth perspective. Mars likely spells the end of big studios underwriting this particular variety of 3-D animation. While the acting in the film was praised, fans and critics were put off by the movie’s appearance.
4. Sahara (2005)
This buried-treasure adventure flick grossed nearly $120 million worldwide – a healthy haul by most standards. But Sahara’s production and marketing costs came in over $240 million, the lurid details of which were outlined in a 2007 Los Angeles Times expose. Some of the more colorful examples of exotic expenses include hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes passed out to local officials in Morocco, where the film was made, and $2 million to produce a plane crash that didn’t even make it into the final cut. Too bad the film wasn’t as entertaining as court records detailing its producer’s spendthrift ways. Inflation adjusted, the film lost $144,857,030.
3. The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)
Once upon a time, a star didn’t get much more bankable than Eddie Murphy. His run of box office successes culminated with the 1996 smash hit The Nutty Professor. The decade following The Professor, however, was filled with more flops than not, and there was no bigger dud than The Adventures of Pluto Nash. The producers of this ill-conceived sci-fi comedy adventure poured a lot of money into effects, but audiences didn’t respond. Adjusted for inflation, the film lost $145,877,124.
2. The Alamo (2004)
This epic war drama was originally conceived of as Oscar bait, with Ron Howard in the director’s chair and Russell Crowe and Ethan Hawke starring next to Billy Bob Thornton. Disney balked, however, at Howard’s $200 million budget, causing Howard to sign on only as a co-producer and Crowe and Hawke to jump ship. Even with a much-reduced total production and marketing cost of $145 million, the film bombed, loosing $146,644,313 in 2012 dollars.
1. Cutthroat Island (1995)
Was Cutthroat Island ahead of its time? Eight years before Disney made franchise gold with their Pirates of the Caribbean, this swashbuckling flick sank to the bottom like so much cannon fodder. Then again, the movie didn’t have Johnny Depp doing his best Keith Richards. Oh yeah, and it was terrible. Michael Douglas had originally signed on to play opposite Geena Davis, but Douglas dropped out, leaving the film with little star power to shoulder its bloated-by-1995-standards $115 million budget. The film is the all-time biggest inflation-adjusted box-office bomb, loosing a cool $147,157,681.
