25 Biggest Flops
I am sure alot of these actors would like you to forget about these movies.
1. Town & Country
Budget: $90 million
Domestic Gross: $6.7 million
Reportedly, Warren Beatty’s demands for multiple takes, rewrites and reshoots were primarily responsible for more than doubling the original $44 mil budget of what should have been a simple ensemble dramedy. Add in estimated marketing and distribution expenses and this staggering ’01 failure lost its studio more than $100 million. If you say Beatty is just a perfectionist, then you obviously haven’t seen this movie.
2. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Budget: $100 million
Domestic Gross: $4.4 million
Loss? What loss? As our friends on Wikipedia put it, “the film grossed negative 95 million dollars,” that’s all. Believe it or not, the project floated around Hollywood for nearly 15 years before it was finally produced and made its subsequent historic crash. Don’t feel bad for star Eddie Murphy, though. His last film, ‘Norbit,’ grossed a mind-boggling $95 million earlier this year. Look for more fat suits to come.
3. Ishtar
Budget: $55 million
Domestic Gross: $14.5 million
It must’ve sounded like a fun, quirky idea for a comedy: Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as inept lounge singers who take a gig in Morocco and stumble into a CIA plot. But “lost in the desert” became more than a metaphor as production problems pushed the already high $40 million budget even higher, and negative word-of-mouth skewered the film even before its 1987 release. Beatty and Hoffman went on to better things … but they’ll always have Ishtar.
4. Heaven’s Gate
Budget: $44 million
Domestic Gross: $3.5 million
Having just earned a Best Director Oscar for ‘The Deer Hunter,’ Michael Cimino scored a stellar cast (Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Kris Kristofferson) and unprecedented creative control for his 1980 follow-up. And he squandered it all, reshooting so much that the $11.5 million budget quadrupled, and the film was heralded as a cinematic debacle. The movie’s failure forced the sale of United Artists to MGM, and reduced Cimino to directing bad Mickey Rourke movies.
5. Cleopatra
Budget: $44 million
Domestic Gross: $26 million
Although Elizabeth Taylor’s dramas — a marriage-ending affair, a near-death illness — were just the tip of the iceberg of troubles for this ’63 epic, they may have been the nails in the coffin. Originally budgeted for $2 mil, the costs ballooned to $44 mil (current equivalent: about $295 mil), a cost that wasn’t recouped partly due to public disapproval for the star’s personal life. It was enough to almost bankrupt 20th Century Fox. Imagine a time when bad publicity was actually … bad.
6. Cutthroat Island
Budget: $98 million
Domestic Gross: $10 million
Geena Davis. Matthew Modine. They were both once hugely popular movie stars. Then came this excessive action-comedy about pirates who yada yada yada that actually ranks #1 on the Guinness World Book of Records more objective list of all-time box-office flops. But on the bright side, both actors have resurged lately with TV roles, and we all know the current state of bankability for movie pirates.
7. The Postman
Budget: $80 million
Domestic Gross: $17.6 million
What is it with Kevin Costner and post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies? He took another run at the genre with this misguided adaptation of David Brin’s novel, directing himself as the savior of civilization — a mythic messiah with a mailbag. Collapsing under the weight of its three-hour run time, jingoistic dialogue and Costner’s hubris, the 1997 flop gave new meaning to the term “going postal.”
8. Waterworld
Budget: $175 million
Domestic Gross: $88.2 million
The most expensive movie ever made when it came out in 1995, the post-apocalyptic epic came to stand for everything wrong with Hollywood fare: massive budget, self-indulgent star (Kevin Costner, who co-produced), all hype and no substance. It crashed and burned spectacularly; and though it made money overseas, in some ways Costner never lived down the failure (or the gills).
9. Gigli
Budget: $54 million
Domestic Gross: $6.1 million
It’s hard to say which factor contributed more to the demise of this celluloid punch line — America’s unhealthy obsession with (hatred of?) Bennifer Part I or the fact that it’s about a mob lackey who kidnaps a mentally retarded man and then falls in love with a lesbian assassin. But the lesson was clear: Gossip mag sales adversely affect box office dollars, and not even a little lesbian intrigue can change that.
10. Battlefield Earth
Budget: $73 million
Domestic Gross: $21.5 million
How do you say “epic disaster” in Psychlos? John Travolta squandered a chunk of the goodwill he’d garnered in his ‘Pulp Fiction’ comeback with this god-awful 2000 adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientologist manifesto. In a nutshell: Travolta plays a dreadlocked alien named Terl. We’d rather take the free stress test any day.
11. Catwoman
Budget: $100 million
Domestic Gross: $40.2 million
Where did this 2004 super flop go wrong? Let us count the ways: 1) a whole new Catwoman completely unrelated to the REAL Catwoman; 2) an unknown one-named man at the helm (Pitof); 3) the apparent belief that fans would pay solely to see Halle Berry in a skintight leather unitard (they showed you, ‘Catwoman’!). We just have to ask Ms. Berry a quick question: What were you thinking?
12. Bonfire of the Vanities
Budget: $47 million
Domestic Gross: $15.7 million
Tom Wolfe’s scathing novel about the excesses of the 1980s could have been a brilliant, era-defining movie, particularly with Brian De Palma at the helm. But nice-guy Tom Hanks was all wrong to play Sherman McCoy, the yuppie “Master of the Universe” brought low by a fatal car accident; and with the story rewritten to make McCoy more likable, Wolfe’s satire lost its teeth — and ‘Bonfire’ went down in flames.
13. Howard the Duck
Budget: $37 million
Domestic Gross: $16.3 million
After the ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Star Wars’ trilogies, George Lucas was flying high. But the Force was not with him when he produced 1986′s Marvel comic-based ‘Howard’ for screenwriter pal Willard Huyck. The ridiculously bad sci-fi comedy about a stogie-smoking, Earth-saving duck (played by an actor in a duck costume) became the subject of endless ridicule, and it proved the biggest mistake of Lucas’ career. Well, until Jar Jar Binks.
14. Hudson Hawk
Budget: $65 million
Domestic Gross: $17.2 million
The early ’90s were not kind to Bruce Willis. After ‘Look Who’s Talking Too’ and ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ came this absurd 1991 action-comedy that was light on both. Not-so-shockingly, it was Willis’ first and only writing credit. But “credit” for this bust also goes to the cheesy sound effects, Willis-Danny Aiello musical duets and unusually high levels of Sandra Bernhard.
15. A Sound of Thunder
Budget: $80 million
Domestic Gross: $1.9 million
Never heard of this Edward Burns-Ben Kingsley fiasco? That’s because only like 117 people saw it. Originally slated for a 2002 release, the time-travel flick was delayed until ’05 due to flooding in Prague (where it was filmed) and the original production company’s declaring bankruptcy during post-production. As a result, the special effects were third-rate, which is not a good call when your film is supposed to be a dinosaur-filled sci-fi spectacle. Call this one ‘Jura-Suck Park.’
There rest can be seen over at AOL Movies.
