It can be tough for a movie studio to know when they've got a flop on their hands until
it's too late.
But once in awhile, films come along that have DISASTER written all over them in big,
flashing neon letters, long before they're released.
The writing was on the wall for these pictures well before they made their way to theaters.
They're some of the biggest box office bombs of all time, and many of us saw them coming
from a mile away.
Aeon Flux
The live-action adaptation of MTV's animated series Aeon Flux, with Charlize Theron in
the title role, arrived a full decade after the last episode of the show aired.
Already facing that uphill battle, the film was shuffled around through multiple regime
changes at Paramount.
Studio head Sherry Lansing initially told director Karyn Kusama that she wanted it to
be Paramount's answer to Blade Runner, but incoming chief Gail Berman wanted more of
a Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibe.
After struggling through the shoot with unclear directives, Kusama then endured the ultimate
insult as a third incoming administration removed her from the post-production process,
and, in her words, "eviscerated" the film.
“Now when I reflect back on it I’m like, ‘What was I thinking?’”
About 25 minutes was sliced from Kusama's cut, resulting in a barely coherent movie;
Kusama would later say,
"What they didn't realize is that sometimes a cohesive 100 minutes will feel much shorter
than an incoherent and barely comprehensible 82."
It predictably garnered appalling reviews and barely registered at the box office.
Cowboys and Aliens
Cowboys and Aliens seemed like the kind of high-concept romp that the right filmmaker
could knock out of the park, and director Jon Favreau, fresh off the success of Iron
Man and its sequel, certainly seemed like the man for the job.
With Steven Spielberg as a producer and an all-star cast including Daniel Craig and Harrison
Ford, big things were in store for the picture, but they missed a couple of red flags.
The script was labored over by more than a dozen writers for 14 years, which is never
a good sign.
It also tracked poorly with its target audience for the duration of its long marketing campaign.
The biggest insult of all?
It just barely managed to edge out The Smurfs in its opening week.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't realize.
How sad for you."
It ultimately failed to make back its production budget domestically.
Cowboys and Aliens certainly had a wealth of talent, but everyone involved forgot the
crucial step of making sure they were crafting a picture people actually wanted to see.
“Ask him about Cowboys and Aliens…”
Fantastic Four
Production problems are a pretty reliable indicator that a big-budget tentpole film
could be in trouble, and few have had production issues as extensive as 2015's Fantastic Four.
From questionable casting, to clashes between director Josh Trank and writer-producer Simon
Kinberg, rumors flew fast and furious about the snafus plaguing Fantastic Four for months
before the film's release.
Trank and Kinberg publicly shot down these rumors, but then the film hit theaters, and
it became astoundingly clear that every single rumor had been true, and then some.
Audiences stayed away, and those who gave it a chance mostly wished they hadn't.
In the wake of the hostile reviews, Trank defended his work via Twitter by implying
that the studio had savaged the film in editing.
As for Kinberg, he ignored the film's troubled production history by placing the blame for
its failure on its tone, proving that some people fail to learn lessons even when they're
taught the hard way.
John Carter
Disney's John Carter had a lot of things going for it.
It was the start of an adaptation of a series of classic, influential sci-fi novels by Edgar
Rice Burroughs, and director Andrew Stanton had previous hits with Pixar including Wall-E
and Finding Nemo.
And it had the massive production budget one would expect for a tentpole film.
Any or all of these things would have been brilliant to play up in the film's marketing,
so of course the first trailer capitalized by mentioning exactly none of them.
The teaser appeared in July 2011, and it wasn't until the 2012 Super Bowl that a second trailer
was released.
Unfortunately, it wasn't much better.
Speaking with Vulture, an anonymous former studio executive called John Carter's marketing
campaign the worst in history, saying,
"It's almost as if they went out of their way to not make us care."
Amazingly, the problem was compounded by Stanton's complete loyalty to the source material, assuming
that the public at large would adore John Carter as much as he did.
“You are ugly but you are beautiful.
And you fight like a Thark.”
This colossal miscalculation plus the vague marketing campaign equaled very few butts
in the seats, and Carter became far and away the biggest flop of 2012.
The Lone Ranger
When Disney's live-action The Lone Ranger was announced in 2010, it wasn't clear whether
audiences were up for a retelling of the adventures of the Western hero.
Plus, a few feathers were ruffled over the choices of Armie Hammer in the title role
and the decidedly non-Native Johnny Depp as his Native American sidekick Tonto.
The production was briefly shut down over budget concerns in 2011, but managed to get
back on track.
Then, in early 2012, fans were treated to the first glimpse of the film, featuring Hammer
in the famous mask…and Depp in the most egregiously terrible Tonto makeup anyone could
have imagined.
The images quickly drew jeers, giving observers plenty of negative things to talk about before
the film was finally released in July 2013.
It failed to generate any significant positive social media buzz, and analysts correctly
predicted that the film would be trounced by Despicable Me 2, which opened the same
weekend and went on to gross nearly a billion dollars.