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Bombs, Disasters and Flops: The Most Notable Examples Part 15 |
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Bombs, Disasters and Flops: The Most Notable Examples Part 15 |
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Note: The box-office figures for domestic grosses and non-USA grosses are fairly accurate, but must be taken as estimates only. |
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Greatest Box-Office Bombs, Disasters and Flops of All-Time
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| Film Title, Director, Studio, Budget Information, Description | |
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Sahara (2005) This summer action film was hotly anticipated, with its sexy male star Matthew McConaughey (as Dirk Pitt) opposite the always-alluring but miscast Penelope Cruz, in the first (and last) of a potentially-lucrative "Indiana-Jones" like adventure series of films. Its tagline hopefully declared: "Dirk Pitt. Adventure has a new name." First-time feature film director Breck Eisner (son of then-Disney chairman Michael Eisner) valiantly tried to instill this absurd film with light tones, but ended up with a very mediocre, plodding action film - with lots of close calls lacking any suspense or tension. Its muddled production was the result of its 20 producers and 4 credited screenwriters. However, the tabloids were heated up over the one-year affair between Spanish actress Cruz (post-Tom Cruise) and hunky Texan McConaughey that began when they met during filming. It was popular with the Teen Choice Awards, with nominations for Choice Movie Actor and Actress: Action/Adventure/Thriller (McConaughey and Cruz), and Choice Movie Liplock between the couple. The story told about two ex-Navy SEALS, hard-drinking adventurer-explorer and Civil War-buff Dirk Pitt (McConaughey) and Italian buddy Al Giordino (Steve Zahn) in war-torn modern-day Africa searching for treasure on a sunken iron-clad Confederate warship that supposedly sank off the coast in 1866, but now inexplicably could be found under the Saharan desert. They were joined by pretty, humanitarian WHO doctor Eva Rojas (Cruz) while she was searching for the cause of an outbreak of a mysterious illness in the region. The trio was assaulted by African military dictator General Kazim (Lennie James) and evil, multinational corporate criminal Yves Massarde (Lambert Wilson), exhibited by lots of chases, a series of gun battles, explosions, and a high body count. The author of "Sahara" (the eleventh of his eighteen Pitt best sellers), Clive Cussler, filed a highly-publicized and expensive (for all sides) lawsuit in 2004 against Paramount Studios after rejecting script drafts. He sought $115 million in damages for not being granted "absolute approval" and creative control over the film's script before shooting commenced. In May 2007, the long, drawn-out 14-week case case finally ended - a court declared that Cussler had to pay the film's production company Crusader Entertainment $5 million, presumably for sabotaging the film's profitability by making derogatory comments to the public about the film and encouraging his readers to boycott it. Simultaneously, Crusader was ordered to pay Cussler about $8.5 million for second-picture rights to another of his books that he had sold to the company. More scandal surfaced when it was reported that a 46-second plane crash sequence that cost $2 million was excised from the final print, and when it was also revealed that "courtesy payments," "gratuities" and "local bribes" totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars were passed out in Morocco, where much of the movie was filmed. |
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A Sound of Thunder (2005) This catastrophic, science-fiction time-travel film from Peter Hyams, based partly on a 1952 cautionary short story by Ray Bradbury, was originally to be released in 2003, but circumstances (including severe flooding in its shooting location of Prague in the Czech Republic, and bankruptcy of the original production company Franchise Pictures) delayed its release until 2005. The long-delayed story told about exploitative, white-haired founder Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) of the time-travel agency named Time Safari Inc., and his hired scientist and tour leader Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), who led weathy adventurers on Jurassic Park-like excursions from futuristic Chicago of 2055 to an era millions of years ago when Allosaurus dinosaurs roamed the Earth and could be hunted by wealthy clients, shooting non-evasive nitrogen bullets at prey that would die anyway. There were only a few simple rules that weren't to be broken: don't take or leave anything, and don't stray off the virtual pathway. The film's suspense developed when one time traveler squashed a butterfly, and time-machine designer/technologist Dr. Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack) was forced to race back into the past before a cataclysmic, time-rippling chain reaction upset the course of evolution and Earth was dramatically changed. Life was already being upset, however -- the primordial growth of plantlife, and then the arrival of giant mutated bats, piranha-faced anaconda-like eels, swarms of carnivorous beetle-bugs, and a pack of carnivorous baboona-saurs cross-breeds - and massive subway flooding. Ironically, the film opened at the same time as the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans. It was soundly criticized for its cheesy and artificial-looking special effects (with obvious blue/green screens), poor acting, undeveloped characters, pseudo-scientific talk, uneven exposition and pacing, a non-sensical script that defied rationalization, and evidence of last-minute editing. |
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Stealth (2005) This big-budget, noisy futuristic action thriller from director Rob Cohen, with the cautionary tagline about technological warfare: "Fear the Sky" told the story of three elite Navy fighter jet pilots: Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Henry Purcell (recent Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx), and Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) who were testing an experimental, ultra-high-tech prototype fighter plane called the Talon on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Philippine Sea. A fourth flier was added to their squad by their commanding officer Captain George Cummings (Sam Shepard), although they were unaware that it was an unmanned, 'perfect' aircraft with artificial intelligence (a UCAV for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) code-named "EDI" for Extreme Deep Invader (voice of Wentworth Miller). When the EDI (or "Eddie") was struck by lightning during a storm and began acting independently like HAL 2000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), trouble loomed in the form of various predictable plot elements, such as a government conspiracy, and a global crisis. This lifeless but glossy film with a preposterous plot (weak sci-fi premise), one-dimensional characters (except for EDI), and inane dialogue was a combinational retread of various flyer films, such as Top Gun (1986) (with loud aerial combat fight sequences resembling a video game, although Ben declared: "I just don't think war should become a videogame"), Iron Eagle II (1988), Wargames (1983) with its computer simulations, Short Circuit (1986), the Terminator's Skynet, and as mentioned the similar rogue computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). One of the film's few gratuitous highlights was the sight of Jessica Biel in an eye-catching blue bikini while on R&R in Thailand, and another incredulous extended scene of her ejecting from her exploding plane wearing a parachute while being threatened by flaming debris and shrapnel as she fell toward enemy soil (North Korea). This late-summer release was a big flop for Sony Pictures, in a year when it also had other disasters, such as Lords of Dogtown (2005) about teen skateboarding, and the remake of the 1960s TV show Bewitched (2005) with Nicole Kidman. The only bright spot about the film was that it became the first movie to be combined with a video game when it was released in the Sony PlayStation Portable's UMD format. |
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All the King’s Men (2006) This pretentious political drama was a remake of the Best Picture-winning film All the King's Men (1949), starring Best Actor-winning Broderick Crawford -- both were adapted from Robert Penn Warren's complex 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of a backwoods rebel. The story was inspired by the rule (and abuse of personal power) of Louisiana's colorful state governor (1928-32) and Democratic U.S. Senator (1932-35), notorious Huey Pierce Long - "The Kingfish", who was assassinated in 1935 at the age of 42. Writer/director Steven Zaillian's film received mixed reviews, although Zaillian had won an Oscar for his screenplay for Schindler's List (1993), and it had a star-studded ensemble cast: Sean Penn as Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford's role), Jude Law as journalist Jack Burden (John Ireland's role), Kate Winslet as Anne Stanton (Joanne Dru's role), Mark Ruffalo as Adam Stanton (Shepperd Strudwick's role), James Gandolfini as sleazy political operative Tiny Duffy (Ralph Dumke's role) and Patricia Clarkson as his associate Sadie Burke (Oscar-winning Mercedes McCambridge's role). There were a number of major changes, including condensation of the span of the story from more than a dozen years to five, the incredulous movement of the story from the 1930s to the late 1940s and early '50s, shooting on location in Louisiana, and the inclusion of many details left out of the previous version - including more of an emphasis on the character of Jack Burden (underplayed by Jude Law), adding to the already-complex narrative. It was a mediocre, overdone, belabored and ponderous two-hour narrative film with ill-used actors, and lacking in the grittiness and real-life vulgar vitality of its predecessor. Three of the seven British actors displayed varying accents. Penn seemed particularly poorly-cast as Stark without clarity of character (except caricature with his tirelessly flailing arms and gesticulations), when compared to Broderick Crawford's bullying personification. To add insult to injury to the stunned director when he realized that his film was both a critical and box-office failure, the shocking Paramount docu-comedy from the TV series about stunts Jackass: Number Two (2006) was the number one film the same week it opened. |
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Basic Instinct 2 (2006) This critically-lambasted, belated sequel to the 1992 film by director Michael Caton-Jones (originally subtitled Risk Addiction) found the now 48 year-old Sharon Stone character (ice-pick suspected serial killer-murderess and bisexual crime novelist Catherine Tramell from the original film) living in London where she was being reluctantly treated by psychiatrist Dr. Michael Glass (miscast David Morrissey) - who soon fell for her game of seduction. The R-rated US version was full of sexy (mostly vulgar) dialogue, an orgy scene, a full-frontal nude rooftop hot-tub scene, and an over-hyped rough sex scene involving erotic asphyxiation. Fifteen minutes of footage was edited out of the film (including a menage a trois scene) to avoid an NC-17 rating. The film opened with an incredulously stunning scene in which risk-addicted Stone was sexually-fingered to an orgasm by her barely-conscious star soccer player-passenger while she was driving her Ferrari Spider at high-speed, causing her sportscar to drive off a London bridge into the Thames River and drown her partner. The unbelievably dull, truly awful film had a fabled, long-drawn-out development past - mostly due to star Sharon Stone's verbal "pay or play" deal contract that entitled her to $14 million advance against 15 percent of the grosses, citing lost revenue and work. She brought a $100+ million lawsuit against producers when its original release date of 2002 was delayed. Reasons for the delay were due to issues in casting the director (John McTiernan was slated, and David Cronenberg declined) and the male lead role (Harrison Ford, Kurt Russell, Robert Downey Jr., Pierce Brosnan, Bruce Greenwood, and Benjamin Bratt were all considered). Basic Instinct 2 won the most Razzie Awards of 2007 including Worst Picture of the Year. Its seven nominations included Worst Director, Worst Screen Couple (Sharon Stone's lop-sided breasts!), and Worst Supporting Actor (David Thewlis), and it won four awards: Worst Actress (Sharon Stone), Worst Picture, Worst Prequel or Sequel, and Worst Screenplay. The film was criticized as degrading, and especially singled out was 48 year-old Stone's brazen and degrading participation, stiff and unsexy nakedness. |
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Poseidon (2006) Director Wolfgang Petersen (perfectly suited for his previous work for Das Boot (1981) and The Perfect Storm (2000)) demanded realism in this fast-paced (less than 100 minutes) straight action film - a soul-less remake of The Poseidon Adventure (1972). To reduce the campiness, he spent lots on expensive props, neat CGI special effects, a 7-story grand lobby of the cruise ship, and he employed thousands of gallons of non-CGI water. Sometimes, the physically-demanding filming endangered the numerous characters. The cliche-ridden film was completely retooled, with a new screenplay (although it retained the basic plot of a distressed ocean liner capsized by a rogue wave), and with all new stereotypical characters although they weren't very well developed or appealing: professional gambler Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), single mother Maggie James with her 9 year-old 4th grade son Conor (Jacinda Barrett and child actor Jimmy Bennett), ex-NYC mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), the ex-mayor's headstrong daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her fiancé Christian (Mike Vogel), galley staff waiter Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez) and his stowaway girlfriend Elena (Mia Maestro), suicidal older gay architect Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), and drunk Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon). The preposterous disaster film followed how the group of super-knowledgeable survivors were able to navigate through the overturned cruise liner, with some suspenseful tension found in guessing who would make it. The well-executed, paint-by-numbers film was basically an uninspiring retread of the original film, with a dash of Titanic (1997) - minus its romantic duo. It was nominated by the Razzie Awards as the Worst Remake or Ripoff, and lost to Little Man (2006), and more notably received an Oscar nomination for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, losing to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). Although the film was a major disaster (playing opposite the poorly-received Mission Impossible III (2006) and the popular The Da Vinci Code (2006)), it eventually recouped most of its early losses through worldwide sales. |
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Zyzzyx Road (2006)
This independent film thriller, starring Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore, gained notoriety as the lowest grossing film of all time. It played in only one theatre (in Dallas, TX) for only six days, and took in only $20. |
Intro | Part
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3 | Part 4 | Part
5 | Part 6 | Part
7 | Part 8 | Part
9 | Part 10 |
Part
11 | Part 12 | Part
13 | Part 14 | Part
15
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
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Introduction to Greatest Box-Office Bombs, Disasters and Flops: Films have the potential to skyrocket the profits of a studio, or to send it into ruins and bankruptcy. Sometimes an actor’s or director's career suffers, sometimes not. Films that cost more to make than they take in revenue (both domestic and worldwide) are considered box-office catastrophes or bombs. Movie audiences often love to relish the fact that some films, such as Gigli (2003) or Heaven's Gate (1980), turn out to be monumental flops, and are fascinated by the details of why certain directors/actors and their films fail.
