Top 10 Movies that Caused Financial Ruin
10.
Life of Pi
Life of Pi was shot almost entirely against green screen and based on a book that you
probably said you read but absolutely didn’t.
It was a stunning work of art and won an Academy Award for its astonishing visual effects,
and unlike pretty much every other movie on this list it made a ton of money at the box
office.
However, its $609 million worldwide gross did very, very little to help the special
effects company responsible for that success.
Even when accepting the Oscar for visual effects, the folks behind the incredible visuals were
basically begging for money because the movie put Rhythm & Hues out of business.
The excessive production values forced R&H into bankruptcy, though fortunately the folks
behind Pi have been able to keep working despite the terrible financial losses the movie created.
9.
Raise the Titanic
No, this wasn’t some weird sequel to the James Cameron blockbuster that you’ve never
heard of.
We’re talking about a 1980 film produced by ITC Entertainment starring Jason Robards
and Sir Alec Guinness.
The movie featured a budget of $40 million, but bombed with both critics and audiences.
Despite being based on a well known book by famous author Clive Cussler and starring a
renowned cast, Raise the Titanic has gone down as one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood
history.
The film made a dismal $13.8 million, meaning it barely made back even a third of its — for
the time — massive budget.
By the way, those total earnings consist of both the box office and the home rentals,
and as if being nominated for multiple Golden Raspberries wasn’t enough, the movie pretty
much put ITC out of business and caused them to sell off their remaining films to Universal.
8.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Final Fantasy is a long-running video game franchise that’s produced some of the best
received games in history.
In 2001, the franchise made the jump to the big screen with the voice talents of Alec
Baldwin, James Woods, Donald Sutherland, Steve Buscemi and Ving Rhames.
The results were… less than spectacular.
In fact, the CGI film with a massive cost of $137 million didn’t actually come anywhere
close to earning back its budget, forcing the studio behind the film, Square Pictures,
to shutter its doors.
It didn’t help that reviews weren’t exactly stellar, despite a glowing review from Roger
Ebert.
The storyline also had nothing to do with the actual Final Fantasy franchise, which
is kind of a no-no when it comes to adapting a video game for the big screen.
The film made just $32 million domestically and $85 million total, making it one of the
biggest bombs in recent history.
7.
It’s a Wonderful Life
We know what you’re thinking: there’s no way the most classic Christmas film of
all-time was a disaster, right?
Yup.
These days it’s ranked among the top films of all-time by the American Film Institute,
but not only did it bomb with critics upon its initial release, it also bombed at the
box office.
The movie grossed just $3.1 million and very nearly ruined the career of director Frank
Capra.
How?
Well, by bankrupting his production studio.
Pretty ironic since one of the prevailing themes that drives George Bailey to contemplate
suicide and bring down the intervention of angels was the threat of financial ruin.
Life eventually, kind of, imitated art as the initial massive monetary issues were solved
by late arriving bundles of cash.
Unfortunately for Capra, unlike Sam Wainwright wiring a bunch of cash, he had to wait for
television syndication to achieve financial success.
6.
Looney Tunes: Back in Action
It seems kind of incredible that Looney Tunes could ever be box office poison, because who
doesn’t love Bugs Bunny?
But after the smash success of Space Jam, the Warner Brothers animated follow up starring
Brendan Fraser opposite Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and the gang not only disappointed at the
theaters, but pretty much destroyed any prospects of Warner Brothers ever attempting a feature
film again.
The movie had a budget that was more than $80 million, but domestically it made just
$20 million, and the worldwide gross still fell well short of breaking even, totaling
just $68.5 million in all.
Poor reviews certainly didn’t help its box office production.
Have you noticed that you haven’t seen much of Bugs Bunny these days?
Well, now you know that Brendan Fraser and an excessively crappy script are to blame.
5.
Cleopatra
It’s not often that you can have a movie that’s considered a smash success at the
box office yet can still be counted as a financial disaster, but such is the case with the Elizabeth
Taylor classic Cleopatra.
The movie was actually the top grossing film of 1963, pulling in $26 million, but it still
managed to lose $18 million because of the astronomical price tag to get the film completed.
Despite having a pretty reasonable budget at the beginning of shooting, it exploded
to $44 million by the time the crew wrapped up.
To put that in perspective, by today’s standards that would be the equivalent of about $339
million, which would make it the most expensive movie ever produced.
Obviously it had virtually no shot at ever earning that money back, and in fact it just
about bankrupted 20th Century Fox.
To date, it remains the only film to ever win the yearly box office while still somehow
managing to lose money.
4.
Heaven’s Gate
When you’ve got the director of The Deer Hunter and a cast that includes Christopher
Walken, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt and Willem Dafoe making his feature film debut (not to
mention Terry O’Quinn, Sam Waterston, Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Rourke and Brad Dourif),
your movie seems destined for greatness.
But such was decidedly not the case with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, a Western set
in Wyoming in the 1890s.
The massively troubled production went over budget by $13 million, finishing up at around
$44 million.
The film was released at three and a half hours long, and now you’re probably starting
to get a sense of why it was such a massive failure.
It stayed in theaters for just two weeks and earned only $1.4 million to make it one of
the biggest box office disasters in history.
Add in the fact that it faced accusations of animal cruelty during filming and this
is a movie that just about everyone involved would probably rather forget.
3.
Titan AE
On paper, Titan AE probably should have worked.
In fact, leading up to its release people were expecting big things from this Fox Animation
Studios cartoon featuring the voice talents of Matt Damon, Bill Pullman, Nathan Lane and
Drew Barrymore.
These days, a cast like that and a concept that involves a spaceship roaming a post-apocalyptic
universe seems like a complete no-brainer, but the movie was such a disaster that it
put Fox Animation out of business.
The estimated budget of Titan AE was $75 million, but it fell just shy of $37 million at the
box office, with its poor marketing being blamed for its failure.
Over the years it’s gained a little bit of a cult following, and was actually nominated
for a Best Science Fiction Film award at the Saturn Awards, though we’re going to go
ahead and guess that the people who lost their jobs at Fox Animation didn’t take a lot
of solace in that fact.
2.
A Sound of Thunder
You probably haven’t seen A Sound of Thunder, but you’re absolutely familiar with the
basic premise of the classic Ray Bradbury story.
It deals with time travel and the butterfly effect, and how killing a bug in the past
can change the course of history.
But despite having such a classic science fiction conceit, the movie is one of the biggest
disasters in Hollywood history.
Starring Ed Burns and Ben Kingsley, the film faced financial challenges right from the
beginning.
Although the budget was originally set for $80 million, the production company could
only muster $30 million due to the company going bankrupt right smack in the middle of
post-production.
As you might guess, it’s hard to finish a movie and make it anything resembling decent
when your financial backers run out of money before you get even halfway to the overall
budget.
Domestically, it made just $1.9 million, with a total gross of about $11.6 million worldwide.
1.
Cutthroat Island
There are famous box office bombs, and then there’s Cutthroat Island.
This is pretty much the Holy Grail of financial failures in Hollywood, infamous for being
the biggest flop in history according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
It was also the very last film ever produced by a company called Carolco Pictures.
The movie starred Matthew Modine, Geena Davis and Frank Langella, and was about pirates
about a decade before pirates came back into vogue in Hollywood.
The movie cost $98 million, with some estimates skewing even higher.
That’s a pretty big budget in 2014, so you can imagine how enormous it must have looked
back in 1995.
The movie mustered only about 10% of that at the box office, topping out with a domestic
gross of just over $10 million.
Director Renny Harlin has gone on record saying that Carolco was already on the brink of disaster
before they even began shooting, and it certainly didn’t help that the film’s distributor,
MGM, was being sold at the time, so there was virtually zero marketing money available
to promote it.
Although it’s not like that would have helped, because who wants to watch Matthew Modine
try
to swashbuckle?