Even though Hollywood had a lot of success in the 2010s, the decade also had plenty of
cinematic trainwrecks.
From superhero slip-ups to animated atrocities, these are the biggest box office bombs of
the last decade.
Directed by Carl Rinsch, 47 Ronin arrived with an impressive pedigree.
This Keanu Reeves action movie wasn't just an adaptation of a real-world historical event,
in which 47 masterless samurai avenged the death of their master.
Instead, it was merely one of many adaptations of that very same event, often referred to
as the "Ako Incident."
So 47 Ronin didn't just have a cool plot, it had centuries of proven success as everything
from lavish stage productions to simple puppet shows.
Basically, 47 Ronin has a time-tested story that you can bank on.
And yet it tanked.
The movie missed every target that mattered, opening ninth in the US and delivering dismal
numbers in Japan.
There are many reasons as to why, with the most obvious being the decision to insert
fantasy elements into the tale.
In retrospect, this is the most baffling choice.
Did a story already beloved for being about awesomely talented warriors out for blood
really need a CGI fox lady and birdlike monks?
Hollywood thought so and suffered for it.
47 Ronin ended up losing Universal an estimated $175 million.
Some critics blamed the script, while others thought the acting was a bit wooden.
"I have come for your help.
We are in need of swords.”
“Then take it."
In the end, it just goes to show that there are no sure things when it comes to movies,
especially when you try to cram dragons into a classic story of 18th-century heroism.
Roald Dahl has generally provided Hollywood with winning source material.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been the basis for two popular films, James and
the Giant Peach is a stop-motion delight, and Matilda is a touchstone for '90s kids
everywhere.
Yet somehow, the film version of The BFG, as beloved as any of Dahl's other stories,
flopped like a giant being dumped in the ocean.
Having Steven Spielberg at the helm didn't save it and generally positive reviews didn't help.
It was a box office bomb in spite of it all, leaving a trail of questions in its wake.
Why weren't audiences raised on similar Dahl adaptations eating this one up?
How did a spectacle of this nature manage to bring in only $18.7 million over its opening weekend?
How did its final gross of $183.3 million only barely clear its budget of $140 million?
The only question this film really answers is "What would happen if Queen Elizabeth and
her dogs drank like a giant?"
One can't help but wonder if Spielberg has simply lost his touch when it comes to children's movies.
Though his The Adventures of Tintin made an impressive amount of money and received largely
positive reviews, it hasn't entered the canon of the best Spielberg movies in any substantive way.
It was fun, but not monumental.
Seen in contrast, The BFG feels like a further slide down that hill.
The BFG is a fine film, but it's not an event, and audiences chose to spend their money elsewhere.
Oh well, at least there's always Matilda.
Ah, to be a boy discovering the joys of his first car.
It's a classic American story about creative drive and personal freedoms.
Similarly beloved are stories about boys and their dogs.They become best friends across
the lines of species, forging an understanding all their own.
You know what else people enjoy?
Weird monsters, especially when it comes to movies.
So was Monster Trucks really such a bad idea?
It combined all three of these tropes into a movie about a boy and a creature who uses
the shell of a pickup truck as a makeshift exoskeleton.
Theoretically no, but practically... yes.
Monster Trucks had a long, strange trip to the theater, beginning as the first film of
a franchise that ended up evaporating, then having its release date shifted multiple times.
By the time it premiered, Paramount was already expecting to lose money, and it did.
Reviews were unkind, and the worldwide gross only cracked $64.5 million.
Monster Trucks, for all its seemingly safe bets, finished behind the horror trainwreck
The Bye Bye Man in its opening weekend.
Ticket buyers might love stories about aliens, cars, and dogs but as Hollywood should know
by now, they might not love them all in one movie.
Take a moment to really let the concept of a movie entitled Cowboys & Aliens sink in.
It's a film title that absolutely rules, and it comes with a good degree of flexibility.
The on-the-nose nature of it allows for a sense of fun that doesn't threaten the spectacle
of, well, cowboys and aliens.
Add in Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and you've got yourself a blockbuster.
Yet none of that mattered.
Cowboys & Aliens was a genuine bomb from its lackluster opening day.
What went wrong?
Reviews weren't terrible, but their middling nature reveals the film's fatal flaw: A movie
called Cowboys & Aliens really can't afford to play it safe.
Though some reviewers felt the film's insistence upon playing its absurd premise straight was
a strength, more found it to be a choice that hamstrung the production from the get-go.
Ultimately, there are better cowboy movies, better alien invasion movies, better Daniel
Craig movies, and better Harrison Ford movies.
The fact that the film barely cleared its $163 million budget with a worldwide total
of $174.8 million, isn't much of a surprise, nor the fact that the movie fizzled out long
before anyone seriously considered the possibility of a sequel.
"I don't want to do that again.”
“No."
Superheroes are omnipresent, and Marvel is the goose that laid the golden eggs...for
the most part.
Consider the Fantastic Four, a longtime cornerstone of the Marvel Comics universe.
Their movies, historically, haven't amounted to much, with the 2005 film being the high-water
mark as a good-enough jaunt that brought in good-enough money.
But the team was owned by 20th Century Fox until recently, and it was consigned to a
2015 reboot meant to compete with the dominant MCU.
Sadly, for the Fantastic Four, this competition ended in failure and reviewers had plenty
of things to say about the film.
However, there is one thing that absolutely no one said…
"It's fantastic."
Why all the criticism?
It was a terrible movie, as dour as it was overcomplicated.
Fantastic Four felt like the sort of adaptation a 14-year-old might make after being mocked
for liking comic books.
Add in lopsided pacing and a convoluted plot, and you end up with the lowest-grossing Fantastic
Four film of all time, a movie that lost the studio an estimated $100 million bucks.
But now that some time has passed, will the MCU revive the Fantastic Four?
We can only hope.
As far as the 2015 reboot goes, fans, critics, and probably some of cast want to forget that
it ever happened.
"That, we can agree on…”
Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel, Ender's Game, has been a classic for decades.
How many thousands of people found their footing in the world of science fiction through Ender
Wiggins' story?
How many recall the shocking ending as one of the greatest literary twists of their lives?
The numbers are untold, but the impact is clear.
A movie based on Ender's Game was primed for success.
Somehow, however, 2013's Ender's Game was a dud.
Despite the wealth of marketing tie-ins, a script for a sequel ready to go, and some
pretty solid reviews, the movie grossed a mere $125 million, only barely clearing its
$110 million budget.
The reasons for these numbers are less obvious than other, similar bombs.
Ender's Game was solidly entertaining, visually engaging, based on a celebrated book, and
released for a public that couldn't get enough of teen dystopias.
It seems that the movie was simply less than the sum of its parts, a bit too late to the
young adult franchise fad, maybe a bit too old in its source material to intrigue today's
audiences, and likely biting off a bit more than it could chew, story-wise.
What's certain is that it failed and studio execs probably wish they could go back in
time and ask themselves one very important question.
"What are you going to do?
Waste millions on a loser?"
Clearly, there won't be any sequels and it looks like fans will have to content themselves
with Ender's adventures on the written page… which is still pretty awesome.
For a species honed by years of evolution to survive against all odds, humans sure do
love seeing themselves in mortal peril.
Consider disaster movies.
They're explicitly centered around watching people die at the hands of forces too huge
and unknowable to ever control, and the genre is one of our most beloved.
Some come as a result of man's overreach, like Titanic, while others, like Twister,
are merely the wrath of the winds themselves.
Geostorm combined these approaches by imagining a global cataclysm created by malfunctioning
satellites that humanity, in their arrogance, installed to control the weather.
Tokyo is battered by a monster hail storm, pockets of Afghanistan freeze over, and on
and on it goes, taking the audience on a tour of worldwide destruction.
Critics ripped it apart, and with good reason.
Geostorm is remarkably boring for a movie of such epic proportions, lacking the jaw-dropping
visuals that are the entire point of the genre.
And the film's humans are nothing to write home about either.
Though many critically derided movies have gone on to make money, Geostorm didn't even
come close to Warner Brothers' expectations.
"It's worse than we thought.”
“Yeah, I think we've established that."
Pixar is as close to a watchword for quality as the movie industry gets.
Almost all of their films are commercial and critical successes...and many are considered
modern classics.
They were featuring superheroes before Marvel brought spandex back into vogue, making monsters
lovable years ahead of Monster High, and introducing kids to sophisticated French cuisine before...well,
they're still ahead of the pack on that one.
But no enterprise is immune to the occasional mistake.
Enter The Good Dinosaur, Pixar's tale of an Apatosaurus and his boy in an alternate Earth
where dinosaurs never went extinct.
It's got all the conceptual charm of a Pixar knockout, from an unlikely friendship to an
early heartbreak that must be surpassed.
But something was missing.
The reviews weren't bad, but they weren't quite up to Pixar's usual standard, and the
box office followed suit.
The film only made $332.2 million, remarkably short of the film's $350 million marketing
and production budget...which by any standard is an epic failure.
“Dang!”
“Oh!!'
Perhaps part of its lackluster ticket sales can be chalked up to Inside Out being released
a few months prior or the extensive revisions the film underwent on its way to release.
Or maybe, just maybe, nobody wanted to see a film that co-starred a grunting cave-toddler.
"This is all your fault!"
Justice League debuted at an odd moment for DC.
The studio's struggles to produce a decent film had not yet been eclipsed by the successes
of Shazam!
And Joaquin Phoenix's Joker.
Only Wonder Woman had managed to impress critics.
With so much competition from Marvel, Justice League had to be a mission statement and a
course correction, all the while introducing the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman.
The fact that it disappointed isn't surprising in light of this, but it doesn't mean it stung
any less.
In retrospect, Justice League never had much hope of recouping even its $300 million production budget.
It's one of the most expensive movies ever made, and it needed to bring in at least $750
million to break even with all associated costs, but not even that benchmark could be
cleared.
Its worldwide gross landed at $657 million.
Reviews for the film were pretty lukewarm, which was better than what Dawn of Justice
got, but still not enough to send the world to the cinema in droves.
Weighted down with expectations, Justice League chugged forward as best it could.
But in Hollywood, one's best isn't always good enough, even when it features Batman
striking cool poses.
Still, Justice League didn't disappoint everyone.
We're sure it was loved by plenty of hardcore fans.
"Not enough…”
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