The very first feature shot in Hollywood was In Old California in 1910, at 17 minutes long it is shorter than the previews at the start of a modern feature and cost $600 to make ($19,208 adjusted for inflation) – just as a reference the craft services alone on the first Pirates of The Caribbean cost around $2 million. That little silent movie kicked off one hell of a streak: Metropolis, Superman, The Godfather, This is Spinal Tap, and that was just in the first hundred years.

Around ¼ of the way into cinemas 2nd century, we have had a few real corkers from Avatar to The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Harry Potter franchise, the 21st century has certainly started with a bang for cinema. Whether your thing is science fiction and you love Interstellar or you want to get your teeth into a serious drama such as No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood; we have seen some truly great cinematic offerings from the imaginations of some of the most talented professionals in the business, in the US alone the industry is estimated to be worth in the region of $91.83 billion each year and that number just keeps going up, but, we’re not going to talk about the good, financially successful ones.

It’s fair to say there have been some movies that set out with a pocket full of good intentions and studio money, only to get mugged between the editing desk and the multiplex. Here are the ten biggest flops in mainstream cinema since 2000.

John Carter (2012)

💰 Budget: $350 million
📉 Loss: ~$200 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Derivative plot, disastrous marketing, and a title so bland it hurts.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 60% (critics)
⭐ IMDb: 6.6/10

A classic tale of Martian mayhem, neutered by fear of the words “Princess” and “Mars.”

Based on the classic sci-fi novel – A Princess of Mars – by Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter was supposed to be the start of a glossy new franchise, instead of an epic version of a beloved classic, a spicy and exciting meal what we got was… a bowl of mediocre wallpaper paste, expensive wall paper paste at that, costing an eye watering $350 million John Carter was a massive loss for Disney studios, ending its first round in theatres at a loss of $200 Million for the house of mouse.

The problem is that the story the film was based on is a classic, a word that in this context means something that has been judiciously and rigorously ripped off by everything from Star Wars to Dune. The original novel was written back in 1912 and was ground zero for a lot of the tropes that, by the time the film got made, were stale and uninteresting, so even though it was revolutionary at the time of writing, the movie was doomed to become derivative and passé.

Part of the problem, as well as being wallet-shrivelingly expensive, was that the marketing for the movie was atrocious. With various groups suggesting rewrites to take the words Princess and Mars out of the title for fear that either term could alienate either the young male or female demographic. So, a movie based on a book called ‘A Princess of Mars’ and they were not allowed to say ‘Princess’ or ‘Mars’, which led to the completely forgettable eponymous title. It also didn’t help that the trailers gave no hint of the movies USP (John can psychically travel to Mars where he is super humanly strong and fast) and made the movie look painfully generic, so despite being one of the most expensive movies ever made it had a worse marketing campaign than “New Coke”.

The film’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it currently sits at 6.6 on IMDB and a respectable 60% fresh critic rating on the aggregate review site “Rotten Tomatoes”. Ultimately, this tale of a civil war soldier who finds love when he mentally travels to another planet where he is granted the strength of ten men and lead an armed and violent uprising against the wicked Therns because the marketing team fumbled at the last hurdle, turns out there is such a thing as bad publicity after all.

Strange World (2022)

💰 Budget: $180 million (+ $90M marketing)
📉 Loss: ~$100–150 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Bizarre release timing, soft marketing, and Disney+ conditioning parents to wait it out.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 72% (critics) / 66% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 5.6/10

A beautiful adventure film strangled in its crib by the House of Mouse.

10 years after John Carter and Disney studios still haven’t learnt to leave sci-fi alone. Made on a budget of $180 million, Strange World isn’t the most expensive animated film ever made; that honour has Tangled and the recent ill-received remake ‘thing’ of The Lion King tying for first place at $260 million each.  The house that Walt built is no stranger to just throwing money at a project and hoping that it comes out with more money stuck to it at the other end, and as with John Carter, it would be a case of death by neglect by the marketers for this sci-fi fantasy flick.

On paper Strange World had everything, a good cast with talent like Jake Gyllenhaal, Gabrielle Union Lucy Liu and, Don Hall (the director of Big Hero 6) and a story that was to act as a loving homage to classic adventure stories like Jules Vern’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, King Kong, and Fantastic Voyage as well as having just a touch of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park about it as well.

Strange World is also very forward-thinking, tackling ideas and themes of belonging and identity, featuring the first openly gay character in a Disney movie. A move that caused the film to be pulled from theatres in the Middle East, China, and parts of Africa but that brought praise from the LGBTQ+ community for its positive reflection of queer characters and that normalized love and acceptance for all.

Despite the lofty ambitions and not insignificant budget of $180 million, the move would go on to invest a further $90 million in Marketing and advertising for the film. A truly bone-headed move saw the release date sandwiched between two blockbusters – Encanto and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The move is anything but bad; in fact, most critics point out that despite a slightly cookie-cutter feeling, it is visually stunning and well-acted, if, maybe, a little stilted in the story department. The film has found a strong following on Disney’s streaming service, and was in fact the most viewed item on the site for 19 days in a row, the love that it’s now getting in the home market is reflected in its rotten tomato’s score where it sits at 72% fresh critic and 66% user score.

Part of the reason for the less-than-stellar performance at the box office is Disney+ + itself, with parents conditioned to wait until a film hits home streaming, as the turnaround time has got significantly shorter over the last few years. With Lightyear and Encanto both in and out of multiplexes before you can say Tonto, speaking of which…

The Lone Ranger (2013)

💰 Budget: $250 million (+ $150M marketing)
📉 Loss: $160–190 million
📣 What Went Wrong? A bloated script, questionable casting, and Depp in full “white Native American” mode.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 31% (critics) / 51% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 6.4/10

The wild west’s answer to “Who asked for this?”

Before we go any further, how ridiculous is it that a man who is always hanging out with another dude is known as The Lone Ranger? He is always with Tonto. Get your story straight, movie!

The lone ranger dropped like horse plop on July 5^th, 2013, and only made back about $260 million (Out of a budget of $250 million plus around $150 for marketing), all told this film lost Disney $160-190 million, or to put it another way it would have been cheaper for the company to just pile up the cash and light half of it on fire.

You may have noticed, dear reader, that I said Disney again, just then.  That’s three for three. Unlike the other two movies that suffered from poor marketing, The Lone Ranger was just BAD having scored just 31% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, but the audience was much more forgiving to the movies bland script and overly bombastic action scenes granting it a 51% score, with a similar score of 6.4 on IMDB.

The film also has suffered from the taint of having reviled sexual abuser Armie Hammer in the lead role as John Reid, the titular Lone-except-for-his-best-mate Ranger, and the story is told by the whitest native American in the world, Johnny Depp, as he recounts the story as an old man to a child – because there is nothing for tension in action scenes than knowing for a fact all the good guys are going to survive unscathed.

The film also took liberties with the character of the Lone Ranger, essentially making him a bumbling buffoon who is Tonto’s side kick, until the train fight at the end when the plot says he has to be competent. The film that had been languishing in development hell for years was retooled to be a spiritual successor to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, with a few similar jokes and a look and feel, but even Depp’s signature comic timing couldn’t save this one. They tried to recapture what they had done for the pirate genre, but simply doing largely the same thing again with largely the same people but with different hats wasn’t enough to make audiences nostalgic for a different group of sweaty men.

The thing is, we very nearly got a movie where the ranger and tonto were fighting literal werewolves and wendigo from native legend – suddenly the silver bullets make more sense.  The movie underwent seismic changes in direction from its inception to its disappointing box office debut.

Mortal Engines (2018)

💰 Budget: $100–150 million
📉 Loss: ~$105–120 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Worldbuilding overload, weak marketing, and steamrolled by Spider-Verse.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 26% (critics) / 47% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 6.1/10

Cities on wheels. Brains in neutral.

Released into the wild like a wounded bobcat in December 2018, and just a little late for the wave of adapting YA novels for the big screen, Mortal Engines is based on a book series by Philip Reeve. It had the misfortune to come out the same weekend as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and clint Eastwood’s The Mule and it got absolutely bodied by them, making back just $7.5 million on its opening weekend, and ticket sales didn’t pick up after that; all told the film made $83.7 million, which is a lot… against a budget of up to $150 million which is a hell of a lot more.

Part of the reason for the lacklustre performance at the box office, other than being hobbled by its release date, might have been the critical mauling it got, sitting at a savage 26% critic score, audiences where a little bit kinder to the film, it sits at 47% audience score and has a healthy 6.1 out of 10 on IMDB.

The premise is completely bonkers. Set in the far future, the world we know today perished due to a catastrophic war, known as the sixty-minute war, which ravaged the planet, redrawing the map in the process. To escape the hostile planets death throes, mankind has put their cities and towns on wheels, essentially moving around constantly. Because of this, mankind has adopted the principles of ‘Municipal Darwinism’ whereby larger cities consume smaller ones for resources. Technology from our era is prised by archologists, and there are some ‘amusing’ misunderstandings that they have about the 21st century; for example they find minion statues and assume they where deities to us (the joke doesn’t quite land; in the novel they were described as ‘animal headed gods’ and where in fact Micky and Donald, but obviously they had to change it because of Disney’s pet lawyers)

The plot follows a young woman, Hester Shaw, who wants to kill Thaddeus Valentine, Head of the Guild of Historians, who killed her mother, who was an archaeologist. Tom Natsworthy saves Valentine, and – after Hester gets away – Valentine repays the young man’s bravery by trying to kill him by pushing him down a chute.

What we have here then is a former insider joins up with an attractive and dangerous outcast who join forces to bring down an evil and corrupt power set on world domination. The big problem is that the books were a quartet; there was plenty of room for world-building spread over pages and pages of narration. In a movie, it has to essentially shoot us in the face with a blunderbuss full of world-building. The result is really quite off-putting, and that’s before we even get to the techno-zombie who adopted Hester. Mortal Engines unfortunately flew too close to the sun.

Turning Red (2022)

💰 Budget: $175 million
📉 Loss: ~$150 million (limited theatrical, straight to streaming)
📣 What Went Wrong? Misogynistic internet backlash, release dumped on Disney+, and clueless outrage over puberty metaphors.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 95% (critics) / 68% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 7.0/10

A teen werepanda fights toxic family vibes and toxic fanboys.

Pixar are nigh untouchable in terms of the quality of their movies, even when they are just there for the paycheck (Cars 2, anyone? Thought not), but not even the mighty Pixar can overcome industrial-grade internet stupidity.  Let me explain: Turning Red is a delightful coming-of-age film about a 13-year-old Asian Canadian girl called Mei, who is starting to crush on cute boys and wants to go see some vapid boy band in concert, on top of dealing with a horrifically overbearing helicopter mum. Mei is a dutiful daughter and good friend, and she discovers that – as we find out later, like every woman on her mum’s side – after a certain point, when she gets excited, she turns into a big red panda (I’m fairly sure I dated her older sister in college). Some of the kids find out and love that they have a werepanda at the school, Mei channels her inner capitalist and starts to charge for merch and to take selfies with her in her panda form, but her mum finds out and goes apoplectic, essentially putting her foot down and telling Mei that she can’t go to the concert, and she’s going to go through the ritual to rid herself of the panda form if she likes it or not. Pixar shenanigans ensue, and it culminates with Mei’s mum as a Godzilla-sized red panda fighting Mei at the concert, the two come to an accord, Mei’s mum stops being so overbearing, and Mei lives her life as a teenage werepanda.

Critically, people whose job it was to go in with an open mind and judge the film on its own merits, loved the film.  It sits on an almost unassailable 95% on rotten tomatoes (even overly critical film nerds like me got the score up to 68% audience score) and a stately 7.0 on IMDB, the problem is commercially, the film got absolutely annihilated only recouping back $20.1 million out of a ridonkulous $175 million budget.

Part of the problem was reactionary knee-jerk commentary from the internet that lambasted the film as ‘woke’ because the main character dared to be female, of Asian descent, and not American. Okay, you guys know that there are, what I like to call ‘other people’ in the world, some of whom aren’t exactly like you?  Also, the film drew ire for the metaphor of the panda transformation being linked to female puberty and, of course, menstruation. With some even going as far as to label the film grooming because she makes money showing off her ‘panda’… even in quotes that reads back as dumb. If your first thought when you see a 13-year-old girl charging rubes a couple of bucks for taking a photo with a fricking werepanda is that its sexual, maybe the problem is with you?

Because of the ‘fan’ backlash, the movie was dropped unceremoniously onto streaming.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

💰 Budget: $175 million
📉 Loss: ~$125–150 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Confused tone, overstuffed story, and a suicidal release slot between Guardians 2 and Alien: Covenant.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 31% (critics) / 69% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 6.7/10

Six-movie franchise plans slain by poor timing and sword fatigue.

Join me, stalwart adventurer as we go back in time to an age both more savage and elegant than our own, I speak of the year 2017, marvel as the idiot kings of orange with golden hair rule over their kingdoms, gasp as the wicked villain Harvey Weinstein is clapped in irons, and roll your eyes in frustration as we have to sit through another King Arthur film.

The film starts mid-battle, Uther cuts off Mordred’s head, but his brother, Vortigern, has wicked intent. He sacrifices his own wife to grant him power so he can become a Demon Knight, he murders Uther’s wife and defeats Uther, but young Arthur escapes to Londinium where he has a tough childhood but grows into a shrewd and tough gang leader, he still has nightmares about the night he lost his parents but is unable to make out who did the slaying.

Vortigern rules Britain with an iron fist and is a cold-hearted tyrant who uncovers a mysterious sword in a stone that no man can pull out; rather than just find a woman to do it, Vortigern rounds up men and has them all try. It’s all for nothing until Arthur pulls the sword out. Overcome by the sword’s power, he wakes up in a cell and has evil uncle Vortigern explain his lineage to him, and that he is to be executed.

Arthur gets rescued, comes to accept he is the rightful king and brings the hurt to uncle Vortigern. There is a tremendous and awfully expensive CG battle, good guys win, and slay Vortigern (despite his having sacrificed his own daughter to become a Demon Knight again).  The film ends with Arthur knighting his friends and laying the foundations for his round table, sounds like the start of an epic franchise, no? Well, no.

Initially, we were meant to get an epic six-part movie universe, something akin to the Harry Potter franchise. The film was a massive flop, though, only making back $148.7 million against a budget of at least $175 million.  There are a few flaws with the movie, the lead, Charlie Hunnam, wasn’t quite ready for primetime, although there are a lot of characters and they have a lot of lines, they are all pretty much indistinguishable, it’s a little muddled and the film was basically sent out to die because it was released right between Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 and Alien: Covenant, two of the biggest films that year. So, unfortunately, this one is a once-and-future flop.

Battleship (2012)

💰 Budget: $220 million
📉 Loss: ~$80 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Too loud, too dumb, and too expensive for something based on a pen-and-paper game.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 33% (critics) / 54% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 5.8/10

They sunk $220 million and forgot to include a plot.

In 1995, Robin Williams starred in Jumanji, a film based on a fictional board game – it was a roaring financial success, making back $262.8 million against a budget of $65 million. A good while later, Universal said, Hold my grog, and we ended up with this. It could have been worse, I’m dreading the day they turn loose a clone monster movie based on Hungry Hungry Hippos

Based on a World War One era pen and paper game that would go on to spawn a full board game and numerous electronic iterations. Battleship failed to recoup its immense $220 million budget, but at that price, not much could be done with the film, which lost $80 million at the box office.

It got a tepid 5.8 on IMDB and managed to scrape a dead average 54% fan score on Rotten Tomatoes, but it only garnered a paltry 33% critic score. Generally, it was considered nothing more than a formulaic if energetic slice of cinema for less demanding filmgoers who just want pretty lights and big bangs, but was considered to be too loud, derivative and formulaic to justify its expense.  It seems, then, you would be better off playing the game. Reaction was not universal condemnation, even Roger Ebert gave the film an above-average 2.5 out of 4 stars, complementing the film’s third act for being more substantial than just a string of explosions.

The cast is pretty good with Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Liam Neeson even Rihanna in her feature film debut. The plot revolves around a small group of warships that have to do battle against an invading alien fleet that wants to steal our resources.

It tried and failed to be a Michael Bay movie (without Michael Bay) and just proved that it is harder than you might think to make a ‘shut up and eat your popcorn’ movie. It didn’t help that the movie was sent out to fight Avengers in much the same way as you could send a baby out to fight Mike Tyson.

Part of the problem is that it tried to crimp off Michael Bay’s style with a look and feel very much like The Transformers without paying attention to the details, that and a budget that was wildly out of control, and a lack of any substance in the screen play well and truly sank this battleship.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

💰 Budget: $200 million
📉 Loss: ~$50–100 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Pandemic timing, streaming undercut box office, and unrealistic breakeven expectations.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 62% (critics) / 92% (audience)
⭐ IMDb: 6.6/10

The Rock couldn’t muscle this one past COVID-era hesitation.

Jungle Cruise is not a bad movie, far from it, it’s a fun family romp from the house of mouse and has some real star power in the form of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Emily ‘the Paper’ Blunt and Edgar ‘The Scissors’ Ramírez. It was good clean fun, and although critics were somewhat reticent with a score of 62% on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences warmed to it much more with a score of 92% and clocking in at 6.6 on IMDB.

Set in 1916, Dr. Lily Houghton (Blunt) and her foppish brother MacGregor hire a cynical and boastful steamboat captain Frank Wolff (Johnson) to sail them down the amazon as they search for a mythical tree that holds the power to heal, Hijinx ensue and after dangerous animals, rapids and dastardly Germans they face off against Aguiee (Ramírez) a Spanish conquistador who was cursed with immortality for his cruelty towards the tree’s guardians.

On paper the film was a modest financial success making back $220.9 Million against a budget of $200 million but paper beats rock (okay, I’ll stop now) and in fact the film is considered to be a loss for Disney because as Box office experts estimate it would have needed to generate at least $500 million at the global box office to have a chance of breaking even.

Part of the reason for this is, like with a lot of post-COVID films, people were sceptical about returning to a packed cinema with a new strain of a deadly virus in the wild, many of us would rather Netflix and chill, than cinema and panic attack every time someone coughs 

Opening weekend had always been the yard stick for judging the financial success of a movie and, even with hesitance in the wake of COVID it still managed to make back $34 million, which ordinarily would be a cataclysmic failure, however compared to its peers ( Space Jam: A New Legacy” ($31 million), “Godzilla vs. Kong” ($31 million) and “Cruella” ($21 million) ) it did pretty well.  The king of the COVID movies was Black Widow at $80 million. For some strange, tight leather-clad reason, teenage boys were happy to take the risk.

Quoted in Variety, Shawn Robbins, the chief analyst at Box Office Pro, said “At this point, the recurring theme on these day-and-date releases is that they’re merely fine in the best of times, and even that feels generous to say, success is extraordinarily relative right now and hard to qualify.”

Tomorrowland

💰 Budget: $190 million
📉 Loss: ~$170 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Vague plot, mismatched tone, and suicidal release window against Jurassic World and Ultron.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 50% (critics & audience)
⭐ IMDb: 6.4/10

Optimism is great—just not when you launch it into a meat grinder.

Tomorrowland was on a suicide mission from the outset. It was sent out into the wild, for some godforsaken reason, on the same weekend as Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was more hotly anticipated among the geek fraternity than pizza-flavoured ramen noodles that make you grow a foot in height and become Batman.

Speaking of Batmen, the worst one – George Clooney – Is front and centre in this one as Frank, a now middle-aged former Boy genius. Brad Bird – the writer of The Incredibles, The Iron Giant, and Ratatouille – directed and co-wrote the script, but he just couldn’t bring the magic to this one.  It was intended to be the foundation of a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ style franchise, which was also based on a ride, but ended up going the same way as ‘Cutthroat Island’ instead.

The plot centres on an insatiably curious teen, Casey, freshly suspended from school for hacking NASA’s computer system, who finds a mysterious pin that takes her to a parallel dimension known as Tomorrowland (Mondays, eh?).  She finds Frank, a (now fully grown) genius inventor, together they team up to find out about the secrets that the mysterious dimension holds. They find that Tomorrowland is being threatened by a group of people called the Tomorrowland Transit Authority (TTA), who believe that the future is inevitable and that there is nothing that can be done to change it. Along the way, they team up with Athena, a character from Frank’s past, and they race to stop the TTA. Along the way, they learn that the future is not inevitable and that it is up to them to shape the world that they want to live in.

It’s one of those cruel ironies that a film about reaching for the stars and being optimistic for tomorrow failed to find an audience, but years later became something of a cult classic.

The film scored blandly across the slate, sitting on a tepid 50% on rotten Tomatoes for the critic and audience scores, it faired a little better on IMDB garnering a 6.4 rating; a complete nightmare for the accountants as, after all of the box office calculus was done the movie lost about $170 million, this underwhelming performance led to all the future movies being cancelled.

Ultimately, like so many of Disney’s flops, it suffered from the hubris of the studio rather than a flaw in the end product, it’s a visually stunning film that is family friendly and even has some genuinely good action scenes, just a pity they pushed it out of the door to do battle with The avengers, there was always only going to be one way that fight ended.

Pan (2015)

💰 Budget: $150 million
📉 Loss: ~$122 million
📣 What Went Wrong? Whitewashed casting, soulless CGI, and release competition from The Martian and Peanuts.
🍅 Rotten Tomatoes: 26% (critics)
⭐ IMDb: 5.7/10

A Peter Pan origin story so bad even Hook tapped out.

Pan is the most disrespectful, clueless, tone-deaf handling of an intellectual property since the ‘My Little Pony’ meat grinder. Not so much released as it was hoisted out of the door frantically trying to get dressed in 2015 to universal revulsion, scoring a positively tragic 26% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a dishwater average 5.7 on IMDB, the film had a budget of $150 million and only made back around $128 million. This woeful performance led to Warner Bros pulling the plug on a planned sequel. The financial loss incurred by Pan puts it alongside Tomorrowland and Jupiter Ascending as one of the biggest box office failures of 2015.

The plot is intended as a prequel to the story we’re all familiar with, only this time around, Hook is an ally, and he has two completely functional hands and the charm of a small glass of lukewarm water. Garrett Hedlund is a fine actor, and I think that maybe the direction may have been off but there was no ‘hookishness’ about his portrayal of the character, as a prequel they can certainly show a ‘work in progress’ version of the character but this iteration left fans of the franchise and critics alike cold. Also, the film cast Rooney Mara, a very white actor, in the role of Tiger Lily, a native American – this was two years after the Johnny Depp as Tonto fiasco.

The action scenes are muddy and chaotic, with the millions of dollars of CGI they must have spent clearly wasted in a rushed, shrill chaos. Todd McCarthy, writing for the Hollywood reporter said that a large amount of the film “a seriously extended chase that possesses hefty CGI-propelled dynamics but absolutely no suspense and a very limited sense of fun” Critics had some harsh words for this film, noting the predictable plot and its overuse of CGI rather than practical effects. Despite the large budget, it didn’t have the impact it needed to make a profit, seeming more like a movie trying to make big bucks instead of trying to tell a story.

Another reason that Pan failed was down to a crowded release schedule, the film had to battle against other top-shelf family films like the Hotel Transylvania sequel and the Peanuts movie.  It was even sent out at the same time as The Martian.  Given a choice between watching a cute vampire, a beloved beagle, Matt Damon farm potatoes in poo on mars or… this it’s never going to end well for Pan