Box office victory is a tricky thing to capture, whether you're a bold new idea with some heavy
star power or the latest installment of a reliable franchise.
Quite a few 2019 movies with big names and big budgets have received painfully disappointing
thumbs downs from critics and audiences alike, and no genre seems immune.
Here are 2019's biggest box office bombs.
In spite of mostly positive reviews, Missing Link missed pretty spectacularly at the box office.
A yeti named Susan, voiced by Zach Galifianakis is found in the Pacific Northwest by Sir Lionel
Frost, voiced by Hugh Jackman.
Susan, Frost, and Frost's old romantic partner Adelina Fortnight, voiced by Zoe Saldana embark
on a quest to unite Susan with other yeti in the Himalayas.
While it got thumbs-ups from critics, Missing Link didn't just do badly, it made history.
According to the website Cartoon Brew, Missing Link had the lowest opening ever for a film
released in more than 3,200 theaters with its opening weekend take of $5.8 million.
It was also the lowest grossing release for the stop-motion animation studio Laika, whose
first film, 2009's Coraline, enjoyed a worldwide gross of $75.3 million, compared to Missing
Link's $16.2 million.
"Sir Lionel, have you ever wanted something so bad it hurt inside?
Like gas, but sadder?"
Laika has taken modern animation in creatively satisfying new directions in the past, but
they may actually be the problem.
Since Coraline, each successive new movie from the studio has performed worse than its predecessor.
Keeping this in mind and paying attention to those few critics who panned Missing Link
paints the picture of a studio that's lost its edge.
Here's hoping they can get it back together for their next release.
In a universe where dolls are tailor-made for specific children, Uglyville is the receptacle
for the ones too strange to survive the Institute of Perfection's standards.
In UglyDolls, one of the toys dumped in Uglyville, named Moxy, voiced by Kelly Clarkson, leads
her friends to the outside world to find out what exists beyond their town.
Sounds like an okay premise, right?
Anthropomorphic dolls, singing, plenty of laughs, a good message for kids that being
different isn't bad.
It's what makes you unique!
What could go wrong?
According to the critics, very little went right.
UglyDolls may say it's about celebrating difference, but critics thought it was just another helping
of the same old stuff, with a boring plot that couldn't even get to the level of being
interestingly bland.
Another common complaint is that, while we all know movies aimed at kids work hard for
the merchandise revenue, UglyDolls seemed to be doing nothing but advertising its merch,
in this case a toy line that launched back in 2001.
Parents seemed to pick up on all this, and as a result, UglyDolls pulled in a worldwide
gross of $19.7 million, not even half its budget of $45 million.
The delightful coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, the directorial debut of actress Olivia Wilde,
is exactly the kind of film that modern audiences say that they want, but that Hollywood just
won't give them.
It's not a superhero film, a sci-fi adventure, or an adaptation of an existing property;
it's smart, funny, and is led by a pair of talented young women in Kaitlyn Dever and
Beanie Feldstein.
Comedic heavies including Lisa Kudrow, Jason Sudeikis, and Will Forte stocked its supporting cast.
It even had the seal of approval from critics who absolutely loved the movie.
Audiences, however, could not have cared less.
"It's basically a popularity contest, he's useless."
Sure, the film opened to some stiff competition.
Disney's live-action Aladdin opened in the same weekend, John Wick: Chapter 3, Parabellum
dropped the weekend before, and Avengers: Endgame was still chugging along toward eventual
world domination.
Booksmart wasn't really aiming for the same audiences, though, going for a crowd with
a preference for well-made, thoughtful, original fare over big-budget tent poles.
The problem?
That crowd simply failed to show up, maybe because they're content to wait for smaller,
more cerebral flicks to show up on streaming services.
If this describes you, take note: if you'd like Hollywood to make more films like Booksmart,
you may want to see the ones they do give us in the theater.
It wasn't at all clear whether audiences even wanted another installment in the Shaft series,
which fielded three entries starring Richard Roundtree as the legendary private eye who
would risk his neck for his brother man in the '70s, and was revitalized with a 2000
entry starring Samuel L. Jackson as the legendary P.I.'s nephew.
Nearly 20 years later, Jackson and Roundtree returned for a multi-generational teamup which
also included the talented Jessie T. Usher as J.J.
Shaft, the son of Jackson's character.
Rather than giving moviegoers an updated take on the franchise, however, Shaft 2019 went
backwards in all the worst possible ways.
Critics found the film to be jaw-droppingly regressive, with misogynistic and homophobic
streaks each a mile wide; its outdated aesthetic wasn't helped by a flimsy, predictable plot
and a troubling reliance on stereotypes that that haven't played well for decades.
Shaft is a case in which a film's failure can't be chalked up to anything other than
what's right there on the surface.
The flick was simply an awful, borderline depressing waste of time, so bad that studio
New Line dumped the film straight to Netflix internationally.
It failed to even make back its meager $30 million dollar budget, proving that, contrary
to a rightfully widely-held popular belief, it takes more than Samuel L. Jackson to make
an awesome, profitable picture.
Terminator: Dark Fate seemingly had all of the ingredients to successfully resurrect
the long-floundering franchise: the return of James Cameron as a producer, the involvement
of Deadpool director Tim Miller, Linda Hamilton saddling up once again as Sarah Connor, and
a slew of talented young actors filling out the cast.
Ignoring the three increasingly ridiculous installments that came after Terminator 2:
Judgment Day, the flick even garnered mostly positive reviews, so how did it become perhaps
the biggest money loser of the year?
"Talk.
Talk fast."
"You first."
There's no easy answer, but one thing seems certain: Dark Fate failed to garner any interest
whatsoever among younger moviegoers, many of whom weren't even born when Terminator
2 became a cultural phenomenon in 1991.
It could very well be that the older fans who loved that film and its 1984 predecessor
simply failed to pass that love down to the new generation, whose familiarity with the
franchise mostly began and ended with three critically reviled movies, 2003's Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines, 2009's Terminator: Salvation, and the relatively recent Terminator:
Genisys from 2015, that Dark Fate completely ignored.
In any event, the aptly titled Dark Fate, which was intended to kick start a new trilogy,
will almost certainly end up being the final nail in the coffin of the franchise.
The filmmakers can at least take solace in the fact that Terminator went out on a high
note, but this time, it sure looks like he...won't be back.
Okay, sorry about that one.
We kinda had to.
Waiting decades to make a sequel to a beloved film is always a tricky endeavor.
Just ask the filmmakers behind Blade Runner 2049, a very good movie that underperformed
severely at the box office.
Doctor Sleep, adapted from Stephen King's 2013 sequel to his classic novel The Shining,
positioned itself as a continuation of Stanley Kubrick's much-adored 1980 film version of
the original novel.
And while this certainly seems like a sure-fire formula for box office gold, the movie's shockingly
poor performance illustrated that, decent reviews aside, audiences were simply uninterested
in picking up with an adult Danny Torrance nearly four decades after Kubrick's film hit
screens, even if he's played by Ewan McGregor.
To be fair, Doctor Sleep debuted during a Veterans' Day weekend during which it seemed
that nobody could be bothered to go to the movies at all, but as was the case with the
Terminator: Dark Fate, it seemed that younger audiences simply didn't give a rip about a
sequel to a movie that probably came out before their parents were even old enough to see it.
With September's It: Chapter Two failing to hit the heights of its 2017 predecessor, it
could also be that the Stephen King Renaissance is winding down, adding up to a perhaps the
biggest mid-budget flop of the year.
One thing can be said for the director of the latest Charlie's Angels reboot, Elizabeth
Banks: she got right out in front of the movie's failure.
In an interview shortly before the flick's release, she gave her opinion that if the
film tanked, the blame would be on both guys who don't like female action leads, and the
entire superhero genre.
Apparently, even successful female-focused superhero films like Captain Marvel and Wonder
Woman, according to Banks, were part of a, quote, "male genre."
Right before the movie opened to a downright dismal box office, she doubled down, saying
that nobody has complained about all the Spider-Man movies that have hit the box office in the
past 20 years, like, say, the three Elizabeth Banks was in back in the 2000s.
Of course, that comparison conveniently ignores the fact that Spidey is a beloved cultural
icon, while Charlie's Angels is mostly known as a cheesy '70s television show which was
never terribly highly-regarded.
Despite the 2019 film's capable leads, it seems like moviegoers simply had no use for
another Charlie's Angels movie.
They're not likely to get another one, either as the flick's paltry $8 million dollar opening
weekend qualified it as a candidate for one of the year's biggest money-losers.
Fox's X-Men series wasn't supposed to end this way.
Dark Phoenix was supposed to be epic, a proper adaptation of one of the most iconic storylines
in all of Marvel comics history, one that fans were ready to give a second chance after
it was already botched pretty badly in 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand.
Since Disney acquired Fox's television and film assets with their 2019 merger, the X-Men
seem destined to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some point, but Fox could have
given their series, which ran for two decades and twelve films, the kind of mind-bending
sendoff it deserved.
So what went wrong?
It wasn't just one thing.
The flick's third act famously had to be extensively retooled due to similarities to Captain Marvel,
and much of the cast, including star Sophie Turner, were rightly accused of phoning in
their lackluster performances by the critics that lambasted the film.
"And you couldn't even do that.
Let me show you how."
Dark Phoenix was supposed to be final entry in a franchise that had been producing diminishing
returns for years.
While 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past successfully traded in nostalgia by merging the older and
younger mutants, 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse was far less inspired, annoying critics and
underperforming at the box office, setting up Dark Phoenix for an epic failure.
Perhaps if the film had simply been better, it could have avoided its fate, but it was,
unfortunately, simply terrible.
What do you get when you put Matthew McConaughey and Snoop Dogg in the same stoner comedy?
Apparently not money, because The Beach Bum racked up only $1.8 million on its opening
weekend, the lowest opening gross of McConaughey's career.
The film is based on writer/director Harmony Korine's experiences filming Spring Breakers.
McConaughey stars as stoner poet Moondog as he wanders through a smoky life in the Florida
Keys, which mostly amounts to listening to a lot of Jimmy Buffet until tragedy strikes.
Isla Fisher co-stars as Moondog's wife, Minnie, who finances her husband's shenanigans while
she has an affair with Moondog's friend Lingerie, played by Snoop Dogg.
While assessing numbers for The Beach Bum's opening weekend, Deadline made a point suggesting
the film's poor performance might have more to do with demographics than taste.
Recalling that Korine's previous film, Spring Breakers enjoyed a stronger opening, the article
points out that film's cast, including James Franco, Selena Gomez, and Vanessa Hudgens,
had a much stronger cast for a millennial audience than one with the 50-year-old McConaughey
and a rapper whose star shone brightest in the '90s.
Then again, a plot that's repetitive at best and depressing at its worst doesn't help matters
much either.
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