15 Biggest Box Office Bombs - Page 2

The Alamo bombed for a simple reason Billy Bob Thornton portraying Davy Crockett. Many might not remember but the tabloids were eating Jolie and his relationship alive at the time and the whole blood vile around the neck thing created a lot of controversy.

Jason Patric was brilliant as Sam Bowie in it though.

Speed Racer never met one person (actually I take that back 1 person) who liked that film outside this site.

I never knew 13th Warrior or Sahara had such huge budgets.

The fact that "The Alamo" was also pretty shitty didn't help its b.o. performance, either.

What? No.

Visually, yes, but audio, ummm far from it. I would kill to see this movie with at least a TrueHD soundtrack. That said, I kinda wish this movie did good as well. It's not classic, but I would of hoped it found a niche.

Oh I've never watched it sober, and always had an awesome time with it (and I'm the type of drunk, while fun, if something utterly stupid is said, I'll call it out).

Just for the record, I enjoy Sahara too. Its mindless fun. But you can't justify that price tag in any way.

I was bitterly disappointed with Speed Racer. If I'm honest I can hardly remember anything about it, it certainly was pretty though. I may need to give it another go. Tati, can you guarantee that if I watch it again I will share your love?


Very admirable. Does anyone remember Spike saying "Shit" in the animated Transformers Movie? I remember I was watching it with my folks and my mum did that comical spitting out her coffee thing.

Again sorry to derail.

If you watch it with an open mind about it, yeah. Realize this was a family entertainment movie and the closest you'll get at a cartoon being brought to life.

Also, all the racing scenes are just spectacular. And the score is simply brilliant. If you don't get chills on that last lap, you are dead!

I also remember Robert Stack's autobot saying God Dammit. That's been edited out too.

No arguments there. Giacchino right? That man is a genius. He literally makes everything he is involved in better. Him and Clint Mansell are the best in the business.


REMOVED???!!!! Has the world gone mad?

Just what if any metric is CNBC using to judge these? The opening to the article makes no sense:
Surely 30 is a much smaller fraction of 1,000 000 than however many millions SAHARA made out of 240 million

Is this list basically just devoid of actual math? Did CNBC figure that since it's "just movies", they didn't need to put as much thought into it and instead just listed a bunch of big bombs in no particular order?

I love Speed Racer and I get sad whenever I see it appear on lists of box office bombs. The Matrix sequels were garbage and its a shame that the Wachowskis got so swept up in all that pseudo-philosophical bullshit for so long. Speed Racer was a nice reminder that these guys(?) are tremendously talented. I don't think I've ever seen a movie so completely off-the-walls crazy in the visuals department (although visually, I do think the Scott Pilgrim comparisons are apt). A truly unique experience that deserved much better.

And yeah, how the hell did The 13th Warrior cost so much? Also kinda surprised at all the love for Sahara. Never seen it, methinks I should check it out now.

Very good

Zyzzyx Road lost $999,970 dollars.

All the movies listed lost HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS.

Wow, I always heard Sahara was absolute garbage, I mean it certainly looked pretty bad, but I'll check it out.

Speed Racer was actually pretty cool. The thing with it is we tend to like it because our expectations were sooo bloody low. The word was absolutely terrible on it, so when it happens to be fairly enjoyable its easy to like it. I hated the broad humour that panders to children like the kid and the monkey, that shit was annoying, but its for kids so you let it go. Even though its cool, I don't think its going to be majorly reevaluated, cuz lots of ppl think its absolute shit. Plus even kids didn't particularly care for it, just us, overgrown geeks. And after the matrix shitfests I don't feel any sympathy for the Wachowskis, I know thats mean, but I kinda hate them for that trilogy.

I thought the actual article was fairly dumb. Its completely inaccurate to rank these movies with figures that don't represent anything close to reality. First of all studios don't take the full receipts, they get around 40%. Anciallaries are also completely ignored. And finally budgets are frequently lies. Regardless, at the end of the day the listed movies were all bombs.

Right but how are they determining "bomb"? Is it about the ratio of money spent to money made? Or did the most expensive movies that under performed just end up on top?

Anyway, along with a weird dislike Mr McConaughy's hair cut on the poster (and the idea of him in an "Indiana Jones" type role.. and heck, the idea of a character named "Dirk Pitt"), the films Box Office take always kept me away. I've still never seen the film. That whole film seemed like a terrible investment for the studios, I don't know what they were thinking. "Dirk Pitt"..

PK is actually correct, if one used a profit ratio, as would be more sensible, the whole list would be different, not that it matters really.

The character of Dirk Pitt is a character created by Clive Cussler, a very popular novelist who has been writing books for decades. There are something like 20 Dirk Pitt novels out there, many of them very popular. If you were looking at starting up a franchise, you could do worse than go with the Dirk Pitt novels.

The main issue is that they already had ONE giant bomb of a Dirk Pitt movie: 'Raise the Titanic!', which opened against 'the Empire Strikes Back' back in 1980 (with Richard Jordan as Dirk).

Another issue which I'm sure contributed to the failure of 'Sahara': Clive Cussler's lawsuit against the filmakers. He HATED the alterations to the story, and he HATED what they did to the Timothy Zahn character of Al Giordino (who is nothing like Zahn's portrayal in the novels). His negative publicity kept most of his fans away from the movie.

Also: taking issue with the name of Dirk Pitt is rather absurd. 'Dirk' isn't all that common, but so what?

Speed Racer certainly wasn't perfect, but a whole lot of people missed out on (didn't 'get', were blinded by some kind of expectations, etc) that one for the wrong reasons, much like Scott Pilgrim. I regret not seeing it in theaters when the reviews came back so harsh.

The determination of it being a biggest bomb is how much net money they lost with inflation being taken into account.

As far as the movie I'm surprised didn't make the list Leonard Part 6.

Timothy Zahn is the Star Wars novel writer. Steve Zahn is the actor who costarred in Sahara.

In other news, it's McDaniels, not McDonald's. These rhymes are Darryl's, the burgers are Ronald's.

A lot of movies on these types of lists are never all that bad, or at least not terrible. I'll be the one who sticks up for Gigli. That totally got blindsided by the Bennifer backlash. It's idiosyncratic and not remotely interested in formula. Also I dig Martin Brest.

"Turkey time. Gobble gobble."

Lest we forget, Martin.

You're right, of course. I ALWAYS call him Timothy for some reason.

I watched Pluto Nash on HBO or some similar channel once, just to see if it was really as bad as I'd heard. Truth be told, it's a piece of shit, but not so bad that you get angry about watching it. It's boring, dumb, and unfunny, but I could imagine little kids watching it and laughing a few times.

Town and Country cost only 44 mill at first. But due to Warren wanting mulitple takes and shots for alot of the film, they took to much time, and the director had to go do some other obligation. It took a year for them all to come back and finish, and eact actor got paid their salary again for the reshoots.

Isn't 13th Warrior's budget a similar case? Even though the film was finished on budget (more or less)...it was the drastic reshoots that ballooned the budget, rather than the cost of the actual film itself.

I remember reading that as part of the countersuit, the filmmakers alleged that Cussler misrepresented the size of his fanbase as well as the total number of Dirk Pitt novels sold. There are plenty of popular novelists out there, but few of them have a reliable track record of having their works adapted into feature films. My point is that I think "Dirk Pitt" was no sure bet, and you may have been better off making a whole new character up from scratch. "Jackson Slate", for instance, is a name that I came up with in under two seconds and it's less lame (IMHO) than Dirk Pitt

PS I am just very attuned to the phonetics of words and names and "DIRK PITT" just sounds ridiculous IMHO (it's the way the two names sound in combination, not just one or the other), but I can understand that maybe other people could feel differently

I have to admit that I admire the fortitude and restraint of an author who can spend his life typing the words "Dirk Pitt" over and over again without either killing himself or dissolving into a fit of stoned giggles before he'd finished a single book.

Oooh, SOLDIER. I was there opening night for that bad boy, and actually enjoyed it pretty well. Not great by any means, but I think I gave it a positive review in the student newspaper I was writing for.

Ah...SOLDIER. I think Kurt Russel has less than 50 words in this one.

Liked it though. Especially Gary Busey.

besides being written by the guy who wrote Blade Runner, isn't the film supposed to be in the same universe too?

If you watch the supplements on the Blade Runner DVD, you can see that the unfilmed opening sequence with Roy on a garbage planet basically is Soldier.

Re: Town and Country. Wasn't there also some issue with a large amount of footage from the initial shoot getting lost or destroyed?

Any film buff could have guessed 90% of these flicks without even reading this stupid article. What would have been more interesting is an article focusing on movies that lost money which everyone assumes made tons of money, or other such surprises (such as Sahara's budget - and why).

Plus, where does this person get their numbers? Does it include marketing, advertising and back-end deals? Their perfect math worries me.

I was given the book "Blockbusting" recently which goes through a number of movies and provides a little info (not a ton) on the history, marketing and stories behind some of the bigger movies.

For example (and this is something most people here probably already knew - but still interesting nonetheless), is that Tim Burton's "Batman" lost money. Yeah, it grossed a ton of money, but with the back-end deals (Jack Nicholson making something like $80 MILLION on the gross) and all the other little things involved, this flick lost money.