The Biggest Movie Flops Of 2017

From an outside perspective, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword seemed to have all the trappings of a film destined for box office success—including a well-known director (Sherlock Holmes series helmer Guy Ritchie), a dashing leading man (Charlie Hunnam) and equally charming supporting cast (Jude Law and Eric Bana, to name a few), and a fantasy-epic feel reminiscent of Game of Thrones. That considered, it's easy to see why Warner Bros. invested a reported $175 million (plus an additional $100 million for marketing) into making the film, but it's even easier to grimace when you remember that none of those things could save it from tanking. 

When King Arthur: Legend of the Sword opened in theaters in May, it only managed to pull in $148.6 million, leaving a deficit of $126.4 million. Critics practically drove Excalibur through the movie's metaphorical heart as well, calling it the "trashiest and most impudent vulgarization of King Arthur anyone is ever likely to see in a zillion-dollar movie." Ouch.

It wasn't easy for Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones' action pic Collide, which sees the two Brits put on American accents as two 20-somethings living in the criminal underbelly of Germany, to make it to theaters. Principal photography started in 2014, and the movie was set for an October 30, 2015 debut. The floor fell from underneath the Eran Creevy-directed project when studio Relativity Media filed for bankruptcy in July of 2015, and then numerous times thereafter when its new distributor, Open Road Films, delayed its release three times. We wish we could say the wait and the woes were all worth it.

A strange story that involves drug runs, drug dealers, drug theft (there's a lot of drugs in this movie, okay?), seizures, kidney failure, some facts about German citizenship, car chases, and a thin romance made Collide difficult to swallow. (Not even veteran talents Ben Kingsley and Anthony Hopkins could slice through the cringeworthy dialogue and awkward plotting.) Jordan Peele's critically acclaimed horror comedy Get Out, which opened the same day, left Collide barely able to survive the cutthroat box office competition.

Overall, Collide bombed big time, earning back just $4.8 million of its estimated $21.5 million budget. One source pins the all-in production cost at $29.2 million, making the film even floppier than we thought.

There has never been a more appropriate time to use the trusty adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" than when describing 2017's The Mummy, a reboot of the Brendan Fraser-led Mummy franchise of the late nineties/early aughts and Universal Studios' first entry into its planned shared monster movie universe. Where Fraser's films made bank at the box office, director Alex Kurtzman's take on the story of a man (Tom Cruise's Nick Morton) discovering a powerful Egyptian relic (Sofia Boutella's Ahmanet) failed across the board. Writers berated The Mummy in reviews: its tone was all over the place, performances from the cast were surprisingly not up to scratch with expectations, its story made very little sense, and its plot didn't carry any of the tension or excitement seen in past Mummy movies. 

The Mummy wound up entombed at the box office as well, debuting to a dismal $32.2 million domestically. The film cost a reported $345 million ($195 million for production, with $150 million for distribution and advertising), which it earned back thanks to international audiences, who bumped the total gross to $409.1 million. However, distribution deals Universal made with certain countries saw the studio only earning back a small percentage (as little as 25 percent from China) of the film's profits. This originally placed The Mummy at around $250 million of net profit, which adjusts to $284 million after final recordings. After all that disappointment, it's no surprise the so-called Dark Universe imploded later in the year.

As any Star Wars fan will tell you, Oscar Isaac (who plays daredevil Resistance pilot and all-around dreamboat Poe Dameron in the current trilogy) is something of a special ingredient. Add him to a project and he makes the whole thing a hit. He did it with 2013's Inside Llewyn Davis, and again with 2015's Ex Machina. Most thought he'd go for a three-peat this year with The Promise, the historical drama helmed by Hotel Rwanda filmmaker Terry George, but boy, were they wrong.

It's not entirely Isaac's fault, however, as The Promise carried with it a few flaws not even the most talented actor could mend. The film focuses on a love triangle between an Armenian medical student named Mikael (Isaac), an American journalist writing for the Associated Press named Chris Myers (Christian Bale), and an Armenian woman named Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), who finds herself caught between the two men. As romance blooms, the Ottoman Empire crumbles to the cusp of the Armenian Genocide–a juxtaposition many found puzzling.

Audiences were quite kind to the film, giving it a 4.7/5 on Rotten Tomatoes, while critics alternately called it "stagnant, contrived, and oh-so boring," and "a powerfully made and sweeping romantic drama that brings one history's most shameful and darkest moments to the screen." The box office results for The Promise were less divided: the film lost $81.8 million after pulling in an abysmal $8.2 million against its $90 million cost.

The Blake Lively-led film All I See Is You isn't so much a "flop" as it is a "fall down a flight of stairs, crash through a glass window, tumble across a gravel-covered street, and smack into a concrete wall." Alright, that might be overkill, but this psychological drama-thriller took such a nosedive with critics and moviegoers that we're surprised the cast and crew don't have delayed onset vertigo.

All I See Is You, which follows a blind woman named Gina (Lively) as she regains her sight and discovers a new sense of self-confidence that her husband (Jason Clarke) struggles to deal with, came with a sizable $30 million price tag ... of which the film only earned back $229,764 in ticket sales worldwide. To add insult to injury, critics stamped it with descriptions like "extra-uniquely bad," "nearly unwatchable fiasco," and "failed experiment," zeroing in on the film's pretentiousness, logy pacing, and flimsy story—drawbacks that easily outweighed the movie's striking visuals and solid performances from Lively and Clarke.

Another bad apple in Paramount's rotten 2017 bunch, the live-action adaptation of Masamune Shirow's adored manga Ghost in the Shell was fated to flop well before it opened in cinemas. When fans learned that the very talented but very clearly white actress Scarlett Johansson was playing the traditionally Japanese protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, the backlash was overwhelming, with detractors arguing that Johansson's casting contributed to the larger problem of whitewashing in Hollywood. In fact, Paramount executives have since come forward to state that the whitewashing controversy that surrounded Ghost in the Shell was a significant reason why the film failed both critically and commercially. 

"We had hopes for better results domestically. I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews," Paramount domestic distribution chief Kyle Davies said. "You're always trying to thread that needle between honoring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That's challenging, but clearly the reviews didn't help."

Even outside of the storm of contention, Ghost in the Shell didn't stir up any noteworthy excitement from moviegoers, the majority of which (both critics and casual viewers alike) agreed that though the film was a visual treat, everything else was stale and stiff in comparison to its stellar source material. 

Ghost in the Shell reportedly had a cumulative budget of $250 million, but only made $169.8 million, leaving the film bleeding out nearly $100 million of the studio's money.

Warner Bros. super-sized superhero film Justice League was supposed to be everything a DC fan could ever hope for–and all a Marvel fan would need to see that the DC Extended Universe could bounce back post-Batman v Superman. Instead, it was burdened with a slew of issues: negative reviews; a disappointing $94 million domestic opening that was the smallest ever for a DCEU movie; and negative press, creative shake-ups, and extensive reshoots that tainted the project even before fans got the chance to see it.

Though viewers still seemed to enjoy the heroic mashup well enough, giving it an 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Justice League still underperformed and ended up bringing in $615.5 million globally–a figure that when cross-calculated with the film's production costs and worldwide marketing expenditures, leaves Warner Bros. suffering an estimated loss of $55 million, possibly more. Let's just hope that if the League ever does unite again, they either make more or cost less.