Which movies will succeed and which will fail is a mystery.
Most of the time, though, we're happy as long as a CGI creature fights stuff.
Yes, Hollywood drops a lot of turds and the viewing public rewards them for it.
Here are the terrible movies you had no idea were blockbuster hits.
It takes a lot of effort to be the most poorly reviewed entry in the Alvin and the Chipmunks
series.
Still, somebody's gotta do it, and that somebody is Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.
Directed by Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo's Mike Mitchell and featuring a cast that includes
Anna Faris and the kid from those Apple commercials, the globe-trotting threequel takes viewers
on a whirlwind adventure when the CGI Chipmunks decide to take a vacation and go on a cruise.
All told, Chipwrecked pulled in $342 million.
Not bad, considering it only cost $80 million and David Cross' remaining mental health to
make.
The Mr. Show star suffered a small meltdown on Conan when asked about the film, calling
the shoot the, quote, "most miserable experience" of his career.
Somehow, his character didn't show up for part four.
Not to be confused with 1954's Godzilla or 2014's Godzilla, 1998's Godzilla, aka "the
Taco Bell one," failed to hit home with most audiences.
"Hey.
Godzilla.
Want something to drink?"
Where did Roland Emmerich's adaptation of the beloved Toho kaiju franchise go wrong?
Was it when he junked the creature redesign created by special effects demigod Stan Winston
in favor of a bulldog/iguana hybrid?
Was it when he abandoned motion capture and practical effects, confident in the fact that
it was three years after Toy Story came out and pure CGI would probably carry the movie
just fine?
Could it have been when he outright stated that the production was washing its hands
of nearly everything that fans liked about Godzilla in the first place?
"The hell is that?"
No, if you ask producer Dean Devlin, the real issue was that audiences didn't get the subtleties
of the film, or the team's decision to make Godzilla more animalistic than supernatural.
That's your bad, film critics.
Flying in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews, Godzilla made $379 million when it
was released in theaters.
Meanwhile, back in Japan, the Americanized version of the beast was so reviled, it was
renamed "Zilla" and got good and thoroughly exploded by OG Godzilla in Godzilla: Final
Wars, taking the Sydney Opera House with it.
Roland Emmerich's little engine that could got another crack at the glitz and glamour
of Hollywood with the 2004 disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, a movie that bravely said,
"You know what'll make people take climate change seriously?
Turning it into a science fiction disaster movie where none of its real world effects
are portrayed accurately."
It was sort of like how Star Trek IV drummed up sympathy by saving the whales, only not
fun.
The Day After Tomorrow was based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and
Whitley Strieber of the paranormal and conspiracy theory-themed radio program Coast to Coast
AM, and yes, it was heavy-handed.
But your hands would be heavy too if they were carrying over half a billion dollars.
That makes it the most successful adaptation of a radio host's book ever produced, probably.
Roland Emmerich is back, not content with the massive piles of money Godzilla and The
Day After Tomorrow made.
As fate would have it, he was granted another turn at bat with 2012.
So, you know.
Here we go again.
2012 told the story of a series of plucky humans trying to outlast the apocalypse foretold
by the Mayans, who somehow had a blind spot the size and shape of their civilization's
unceremonious decline but kept a solid bead on the end of days.
Now mostly remembered as a reminder John Cusack hit his sell by date right after America's
Sweethearts, at the time it felt more like an Oliver Stone-esque catastrophizing of people's
actual concerns about the end of days.
"Kate, California is going down!"
It's been a busy decade, so you'll be forgiven if you don't remember how freaked out some
members of the public got about the 2012 end of the world predictions.
It was brought up by talk show hosts, televangelists, and New Age religious leaders, nearly all
of whom must have been around for Y2K and known better.
So when the ad campaign for 2012 was played as a straight-faced warning of humanity's
coming doom, it allegedly led to young people contemplating self harm to avoid the event
and a lecture from NASA on responsibility.
"The widespread rumors that there will be a catastrophe or even a doomsday on December
21st are wrong.
This is simply a big hoax."
All told, 2012 raked in $788 million worldwide, making it the fifth highest grossing film
of the year, with Avatar taking most of the other four spots.
You may remember Roland Emmerich from...look, the guy tends to have one speed, and in 2008,
he released 10,000 BC, one of the blessedly few movies about cavemen without Ringo Starr.
Written, directed, and produced by Emmerich, 10,000 BC was all about a surprisingly well
waxed early human hunting prehistoric CGI animals in a region of the world we'll call
The Uncanny Valley.
When his lady friend, another exceptionally well-groomed cave type named Evolet, is captured
by bad guys, he's forced to do action things.
There's a prophecy involved.
It's something you can really relate to if you, too, are a messianic prehistoric Homo
sapien that found a package of Gillette razors.
The movie cost just a bit over $100 million to make and wound up making nearly three times
that amount back after DVD sales were factored in.
And here's the extra bonkers part of the story: it spawned the name "Evolet," which started
popping up as a baby moniker that same year.
That means that somewhere out there, there's a tween living blissfully unaware that she's
named after a scantily clad cavewoman from a movie that Richard Roeper once listed as
being only slightly worse than The Love Guru.
2001's Planet of the Apes seemed like a solid bet at the time.
The inarguably oddball franchise had been handed over to acclaimed weirdo Tim Burton,
chronologically equidistant at this point from the 1992 masterpiece Batman Returns and
the soulless 2010 cash grab Alice in Wonderland.
It could've gone either way, basically.
What it turned out to be was rough.
While the makeup was on point and most of the cast was rock solid, the movie also featured
a not-quite-done-cooking-yet Mark Wahlberg, an ending that didn't make a lick of sense,
and frankly, a whole lot of boring.
Still, it made $362 million, so there you go.
"How the hell did these monkeys get like this?"
"What other way would they be?"
"Be begging me for a treat right now."
And you know what?
It's important to talk about not only how bad it actually was, but how astonishingly
bad it could have been.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was on board to star and Oliver Stone was slated to write and produce
an Apes revival in the early 90s, which SyFy quotes him as describing thus:
"It has the discovery of cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes who hold the secret numeric codes
to the Bible that foretold the end of civilizations...My concept is that there's a code inscribed in
the Bible that predicts all historical events."
Count your blessings.
Hey, remember back before Marvel managed to reconstitute itself into an unstoppable, all-encompassing
gelatin of crowd pleasing properties?
Remember how, for a little while, there were movies that took place in a universe where
there was only one superhero?
How, within that story, a single guy dressed in a skintight onesie shot sticky goo at people
and everyone in New York was like, "It's cool with us, go Jets!"
Things were simpler back then.
"I'm Peter Parker.
I'm a photographer."
"Yes.
I can see that."
And they were huge.
The Spider-Man movies were a cultural phenomenon that, arguably more than any other picture
since Superman, validated superhero flicks as a viable money printing machine.
With Spider-Man 3 being the most blandly reviewed entry in the series as well as the one that
slaughtered the franchise, you might think that it was a commercial failure.
Nope.
Spider-Man 3 pulled an $890 million worldwide haul on a $258 million budget.
Sony was reportedly stoked on the idea of three more movies, but Sam Raimi pulled out
of the series for creative reasons, and the plans were scrapped.
There's an argument to be made that Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland could have been a great
movie if he'd made it 10 years earlier.
Burton fatigue wouldn't have set in yet.
The push to up a movie's box office take by shoehorning in 3D effects wouldn't even be
a bubble yet, let alone one on its way to popping.
Studios wouldn't have had that Harry Potter light in their eyes, pushing them to turn
every recognizable property into a potential tween-centric fantasy franchise.
Sadly, what we got was a real drag of a movie, which took a purposely nonsensical universe
and tried to apply big budget, Narnia-adjacent logic to it.
Critical reception was tepid.
Burton, once maybe the closest thing to a post-70s blockbuster auteur, brought all the
artistic vision of a Spencer's Gifts manager decorating the front window display.
Johnny Depp, his returns well on their way to diminishing, wore a silly wig and a big
hat.
Audiences suddenly realized that this was his only trick, and the world was a less innocent
place for it.
But then Earth, as one, seemed to shout, "Well, that popcorn's not going to eat itself," and
Alice in Wonderland made over a billion dollars.
"Three coins from a dead man's pocket.
Two teaspoons of wishful thinking…"
Then it spawned an even harder to watch sequel, which, while not the mattress stuffed with
money that Disney was probably hoping for, still pulled in nearly $300 million.
You'd think that the reason people love animals so much might be because we want something
alive that doesn't talk a lot, but that theory flies right out the window when you realize
that we'll spend inordinate amounts of money on movies about critters that won't shut up.
Not a lot of people saw Garfield 2 and walked away feeling anything but irritated.
So it speaks to the human race's deep sense of self-loathing when you look up how much
money the Ice Age franchise made.
Here's a thought experiment: if you had to put a dollar amount on how much the world
wanted to listen to Ray Romano's dulcet tones coming out of a hairy elephant, what would
that figure look like?
It's more than that.
It's obscene.
The franchise has raked in $3.2 billion across five films, with the third movie, Dawn of
the Dinosaurs, pulling in the lion's share at $886 million in 2009.
Now ask yourself, and be honest: did we really love Scrat that much?
It would be nearly impossible to find a unique series of words to describe Batman v Superman
which, in the infinitely shuffled deck of the internet's lexicon, hasn't already been
dealt.
Critical response was abysmal.
Comic book fans were distraught.
In a Wall Street Journal piece, the movie was described as such:
"It's a clash of cultural icons.
It's about the politics of military intervention and terrorism.
It's inspired by W.H.
Auden and Umberto Eco."
In reality, two computer generated cape guys punched each other until they found out their
moms had the same name.
"You're letting him kill Martha."
The bittersweet result was a movie that made $873 million worldwide and was reported to
have the fourth biggest opening weekend ever at the time of its release.
However, it also failed to hit that ever so tasty billion dollar mark, and was considered
a box office disappointment.
Thematically, it was weak sauce enough that even other DC productions made fun of it.
"What's your mother's name?"
"Martha."
"My mommy's name is Martha, too."
Maybe it seems rude to call Suicide Squad terrible.
Some people probably really liked Suicide Squad.
Some people probably liked scraping their knees on the pavement when they were kids.
People are weird.
At just under $750 million in ticket sales, David Ayer's opus might seem like relatively
small potatoes compared to most widely released superhero pictures.
But one of the more incredible aspects of the movie's release was that it raked in that
kind of money without ever being officially released in China, a country that Hollywood
has widely regarded as their personal ATM.
Forbes pointed out a Chinese release would've likely meant a box office take that would've
dwarfed Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Still, three quarters of a billion is nothing to sneeze at.
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