The Most Expensive Movie Flops In History

Movies take a staggering amount of money to make, to the point that a budget below $50 million (that's a "50" with six zeros after it) is considered mid- or even low-budget. It usually works out in the end, since movies also make a staggering amount of money, but not all movies are so lucky. Here are some of the most expensive movie flops in the history of cinema, ranked without adjustments for inflation.

You might not recognize Rob Cohen by name, but you almost certainly remember his movies—or their star, Vin Diesel. Cohen directed both The Fast and the Furious and XXX, which makes him at least partly responsible for the Vin Diesel era we're currently living in. That couldn't save him, however, when Stealth flopped, potentially spelling the end of Cohen's major movie career.

The movie follows a group of trained Air Force pilots as they try to take down a corrupted AI-controlled jet, and reads more like a science-fiction parody of Top Gun than the guileless, masculine-driven tone of Cohen's more successful movies. It grossed $76 million, but the price tag of $135 million meant it needed to bring in a lot more than that. Maybe with Diesel on board it might have fared better; as it is, Stealth seems to have snuck by moviegoers.

CGI-animated adaptations of children's stories have never exactly been favorite for most audiences, and Jack the Giant Slayer ended up being no different. Revisiting a fairy tale most viewers knew by heart was a risk to begin with, and director Bryan Singer's movie only scored $65 million at the domestic box office, against a $195 million budget. (It would eventually break even thanks to international returns.)

The movie's underwhelming performance at home means it's generally thought of as a box office failure—when people even think of it at all. Some critics have argued that its failure stems from an inability to combine the mature content of Singer's past films with the studio's desire to make a family-friendly franchise, but either way, the movie's budget was one giant Jack couldn't slay.

The Lone Ranger is a classic part of American pop culture. In the same way that you don't need to be a fan of Superman to know that he stands for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," The Lone Ranger's catchphrase of "Hi-ho, Silver, away!" has become ingrained in the lexicon. Unfortunately for the makers of 2013's The Lone Ranger, that didn't make much of a difference at the box office, where the film barely made $89 million domestic against its $215 million budget. It eventually recouped another $171 million worldwide, but that didn't make it any less of a failure in the United States.

The odds were stacked against The Lone Ranger. The cast includes Johnny Depp (consistently one of Hollywood's most overpaid actors for years) and the relatively unproven Armie Hammer. The movie's efforts to depict Native American sidekick Tonto in a less-offensive way than past adaptations proved even more difficult when the production came under fire for whitewashing the character by casting Depp. Finally, the movie's budget was astronomical—marketing expenses aren't even usually factored into reported budgets, meaning the movie could have cost more than $300 million in all.

The 13th Warrior is an adaptation of Eaters of the Dead, a novel by Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park fame) that loosely adapts the myth of Beowulf. While the film earned some recognition for its expensive set pieces, those costly moments ended up ballooning the film's budget to $160 million, not a cheap price tag in 1999. The box office returns were only $61.7 million, leaving the film with a deficit of almost $100 million.

The movie's failure to find an audience is a bit of a puzzler, since the source material was by a proven bestselling writer and it was directed by John McTiernan (director of Die Hard). Maybe it was the late name change from Eaters of the Dead to The 13th Warrior that made audiences suspicious of the film, or maybe it was the fact that Crichton took over partway through and cut anything he didn't like. Whatever the reasons, the end results were so embarrassing that co-star Omar Sharif ended up briefly retiring from acting in disgust.

Box office bombs are often the result of a studio betting too highly on a director or concept, letting the budget balloon out of control, and then interfering with the finished product in a vain attempt to recoup their money. 47 Ronin is a perfect example, with a title that evokes the Japanese historical epic of the same name about a group of masterless samurai who make one last stab at redemption.

The actual movie shares almost nothing in common with the real-life story, adding in monsters, giants, and a half-Japanese lead played by Keanu Reeves just a few years before his performances in Master of Tai Chi and John Wick would restore his critical standing. The director, Carl Rinsch, was known entirely for his shorts work prior, and the massive budget didn't seem to help the fledgling director acclimate. The movie earned a paltry $38 million domestic to match its $175 million budget; the international box office brought it up to $150 million eventually, but it was still a massive all-around flop—and Rinsch hasn't helmed a feature film since.