The Biggest Box Office Bombs of the Last 10 Years
There are various ways to measure a box office bomb, but when it really comes down to it, the best way to measure these things is cold hard cash.
In the last ten years, as budgets swelled and superhero fatigue set in, movie studios had to come to terms with the fact that their most reliable properties were no longer the safest bet for financial returns – and as the list below shows, this included some of the biggest IP imaginable.
To mark the disastrous rollout of Anthony Mackie’s Saudi-funded Desert Warrior (which could yet make this list when all is said and done), I’ve rounded up the ten most alarming cinematic financial splats of the last decade – which I’ve attempted to rank by just how much cash they might have lost.
Read on to learn a bit more about each of them and – on the off-chance that you’re feeling guilty for not having bought a ticket at the time – use the guide to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and others.
What exactly was Wish? It’s a question that is probably still being asked in the minds of some of Disney’s most high-powered executives. Written by Jennifer Lee (the filmmaker behind Frozen) and Allison Moore, this animated tale about a teenage girl who wishes on a star only to discover that an evil sorcerer named Magnifico has been stealing peoples’ memories, made a quarter of billion dollars at the box office, but given its huge budget and marketing costs it actually went down as a $130 million loss. That’s movie math, baby.
It’s doubly unfortunate, as Wish was made to celebrate the legendary studio’s centennial (hence all that “wishing on a star” stuff) but it ended up being arguably the most high profile bomb in its history.
If the superhero movies of the last 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that the studios should beware the Dark Phoenix. Jean Grey’s all-powerful alter-ego has now been (at least somewhat) responsible for two generations of X-Men movies turning to ash: first, as one of the many messy subplots in Brett Ratner’s The Last Stand (a disastrous third installment of what should have been a great trilogy) and then, more glaringly, as the disappointing fourth act of the McAvoy/Fassbender era.
The first of those generations are set to appear together one last time in Avengers: Doomsday this December, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for something similar happening with Sophie Turner’s version of the character. Certainly not after the self-titled movie lost a reported $130 million for 20th Century Fox after its release in 2019.
Back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, an original Roland Emmerich disaster movie was basically a guarantee for bums on seats. His remake of Godzilla might have drawn less roars than the German director had expected in 1998, but his previous film, Independence Day, had been the most successful movie of 1996 by a mile. He also continued to make it rain for the studios (and blow up the White House again and again) with The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 in the decade that followed.
By the release of 2012, however, audiences had started to grow a little tired of the genre and its overreliance on CGI – released one year earlier, parody flick Disaster Movie already suggested that a few nails were in the coffin. Even still, when Emmerich returned to the genre with Moonfall (a delightfully absurd and, I think, self aware sci-fi disaster flick) in 2022 I had a suspicion that the nostalgia factor might prove to be enough for it to get by on. I was wrong, to the tune of roughly $100 million.
One box office bomb that I’ve never quite got my head around is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – a 2023 release that saw most of the gang return (along with well-liked newcomers like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, and Antonio Banderas) for one last caper, a full 15 years after Crystal Skull’s release.
Sure, Spielberg largely sat this one out, but he’d handed the reins to James Mangold – perhaps the safest pair of hands in Hollywood at the time, having won over audiences and critics alike with movies like Logan and Ford v Ferrari. But, for whatever reason, the whip failed to meet its target this time and the movie lost somewhere in the region of $100-150 million.
Some believe this was due to the sniffy reviews it had received after its premier at Cannes Film Festival – a suspicion that has, in turn, led to Hollywood thinking twice about debuting its shiniest titles in such lofty places.
If, like me, you’d never heard of Disney’s animated movie Strange World before, its placement on our list probably doesn’t need much explaining. The 2022 financial disaster cost the studio somewhere in the region of $152 million to make, and that’s before marketing and distribution costs come into it. I’m not a mathematician, but the movie’s eventual $73 million box office haul represents the biggest single financial deficit in the history of the great animation studio.
The sci-fi adventure, which is set on a distant planet that’s home to a precious resource (yes, like Avatar), boasted everyone from Jake Gyllenhaal to Lucy Liu and Dennis Quaid in its glittering voice cast, but even those names couldn’t save the movie from a collective shrug from moviegoers.
If you find yourself in a contrarian mood, you could argue that the sequel to Todd Phillip’s billion-dollar-earning and Oscar-winning Joker was actually a fascinating deconstruction of, and comment on, how certain sections of the manosphere had taken its predecessor as a call to arms.
Try telling that to the comic book fans who showed up to see Joaquin Phoenix’s incarnation of the character (and Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn) sing tunes from the great American songbook. Most of the reviews were unsparing, however, and the public responded in turn – or rather, they decided not to. On an estimated budget of over $200 million, it lost the studio $140 million and vanished before you could say Arthur Fleck. Who the joke was on, however, is still up for debate.
And while we’re talking Arthurs… if you weren’t at cinema-going age in 2018, you mightn’t be aware that Guy Ritchie once took a big swing with a movie called King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Given the rate of the director’s output these days, you’d be forgiven for forgetting about its existence, regardless.
On paper, the filmmaker once heralded as the UK’s answer to Quentin Tarantino probably seemed like a safe bet to bring the classic British tale of the Knights of the Round Table back to life in his signature, anachronistic way, but the movie he unearthed was a blunt instrument that cost the studio a whopping $150 million. Still, it did have a cameo from David Beckham – which was not not something.
Christian Rivers became friends with Peter Jackson when they were both teenagers and would go on to work as a storyboard artist on each of the New Zealander’s movies from Braindead all the way up to his epic journey through Middle-earth. Sadly for the old pals, Jackson’s magic touch was nowhere to be found when Rivers moved to directing with Mortal Engines, his first feature as director and, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster.
The steampunk adventure began its life as a best-selling novel before being adapted for the screen by Jackson and his regular co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, but the eventual movie was torn apart by the critics upon release and had to face the daunting task of directly competing with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for ticket sales. It ended up in the red to the tune of $185 million. Sadly, Rivers hasn’t directed a feature since.
Was Black Adam responsible for the end of the DCEU or was it the remarkable failure of 2023’s The Flash? Oddly enough, this was a movie that scored a fairly respectable 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and in which Michael Keaton reprised his most famous role, a full 31 years after last appearing as the caped crusader in Batman Returns. But, for one reason or another it failed to pick up speed in any way.
Perhaps this was down to early reports that James Gunn was already being eyed up to relaunch the universe, or maybe it was something to do with all the bad press and allegations surrounding the film’s star, Ezra Miller. Whatever the case, it cost WB a whopping $200 million, making it the worst performance of any studio superhero movie ever – at least for a few months…
Indeed, as Gunn was busy scrubbing the E from the DCEU, his former employers over at Marvel were about to face their own moment of extreme self-reflection with the release of The Marvels – a movie that did more to halt the studio’s overwhelming rollout of characters and shows than anything before or after.
We can point to the fact that the supremely powerful Carol Danvers is just a little too omnipotent to be a truly compelling hero, or the fact that not enough regular cinemagoers had been aware of Iman Vellani’s charming performance as Ms. Marvel in her underseen, introductory TV show. Whatever the case, if some trade estimates are to be believed, the movie lost Marvel Studios a scarcely fathomable $237 million. Like Captain Marvel herself, that is a figure that will take some beating.
