Box Office Bombs That Everyone Saw Coming

It can be tough for a movie studio to know when they've got a big old flop on their hands until it's far too late. Unless you're Marvel, every picture constitutes a gamble; audiences can be fickle and unpredictable, and just as smash hits come soaring out of left field, so can giant bombs — and a nine-figure budget and advertising funds to match are no guarantee of success. 

But every once in awhile, films come along that have DISASTER written all over them in big, flashing neon letters long before they're released. Whether they justifiably languished in development hell, adapted properties nobody wanted to see onscreen, or fell victim to pure bad timing, they were all a special brand of flop. The writing was on the wall for these pictures well before they made their way to theaters — they're some of the biggest box office bombs of all time, and many of us saw them coming from a mile away.

2002's The Adventures of Pluto Nash is one of the more puzzling films ever, in that it's a wonder it was released at all. The story of a space smuggler who bails out the indebted owner of a nightclub located on the moon, it was in development for an unreasonably long time — the original script was written in the '80s and worked over countless times by a long line of script doctors until it was finally deemed acceptable and shot with an all-star cast and Eddie Murphy in the title role, wrapping production in 2000. Then it sat on a shelf for two full years before its release. Warner Bros. claimed that the delay was in the interest of getting the special effects just right, but upon the film's release, it was obvious that this was baloney; Pluto Nash is simply one of the worst movies ever made.

The film's long and troubled production history would have raised red flags even if Murphy hadn't been well into the "sleepwalk through everything" phase of his career. The endlessly toiled-over script contained nothing resembling interesting characterizations, a unique plot, or jokes that were actually funny, and no amount of expensive special effects could paper over Murphy's plain disinterest in the film. The $100 million production didn't even crack $10 million at the box office worldwide, and Warners learned the valuable lesson that obvious turkeys don't improve with age.

2011's Cowboys and Aliens seemed like the kind of high-concept romp that the right filmmaker could knock out of the park, and director Jon Favreau — fresh off the success of Iron Man and its sequel — certainly seemed like the man for the job. With Steven Spielberg as a producer and an all-star cast including Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, DreamWorks and distributor Paramount were predicting big things for the picture — but they should have paid a little closer attention to that writing on the wall.

For one thing, the script was labored over by more than a dozen writers for 14 years, which is never a good sign. For another, many observers assumed by its title that the film would be a comedy, rather than a straight-faced action outing (it wasn't), and it tracked consistently poorly among its target audience for the duration of its months-long, multi-faceted, very expensive marketing campaign. It just barely managed to edge out The Smurfs in its first week, and followed that performance with a precipitous drop which resulted in its failing to make back its production budget domestically. Cowboys and Aliens certainly had a wealth of talent on either side of the camera, but everyone involved forgot the crucial step of making sure they were crafting a picture people actually wanted to see.

Disney's John Carter had a lot of things going for it. It was an adaptation of the first in a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (also the creator of Tarzan) which had been a towering influence on pop culture staples such as Star Wars and Avatar; it was helmed by Andrew Stanton, the director of beloved Pixar outings Wall-E and Finding Nemo; and it had the type of ridiculously huge production budget one would expect for a tentpole film. Any or all of these things would have been brilliant to play up in the film's marketing — so of course the first trailer capitalized by mentioning exactly none of them.

The teaser appeared in July 2011, and it wasn't until the 2012 Super Bowl that a second trailer was released. Unfortunately, it wasn't much better, and in the interim the film had become something of a joke among the moviegoing public. Speaking with Vulture, an anonymous former studio executive called John Carter's marketing campaign the worst in history, saying, "It's almost as if they went out of their way to not make us care." Amazingly, the problem was compounded by Stanton's familiarity with (and complete loyalty to) the source material — he called Burroughs' novels "my Harry Potter" — and his apparent assumption that the public at large adored John Carter as much as he did. This colossal miscalculation plus the vague marketing campaign equaled zero butts in the seats, and Carter became far and away the biggest flop of 2012.

When Disney's live-action The Lone Ranger was announced in 2010, it was not at all clear whether audiences were even up for a retelling of the adventures of the Western hero. More recent adaptations of the property had traditionally not fared very well, and while Gore Verbinski (of the Pirates of the Carribean series) was tapped to direct, a few feathers were ruffled over the choices of Armie Hammer in the title role and the decidedly non-Native Johnny Depp as his Native American sidekick Tonto. The production was briefly shut down over budget concerns in 2011 — never a good sign — but managed to get back on track. Then, in early 2012, fans were treated to the first production stills, featuring Hammer in the famous mask... and Depp in the most egregiously terrible Tonto makeup anyone could have imagined.

The images quickly drew jeers and charges of racism, giving observers plenty of negative things to talk about for before the film was finally released in July 2013. It failed to generate any significant positive social media buzz, and analysts correctly predicted that the film would be trounced by Despicable Me 2, which opened the same weekend and went on to gross nearly a billion dollars. 

In the days before the Pirates of the Caribbean series became a box office juggernaut, swashbuckling epics were notoriously risky propositions, but this was far from the biggest problem with the 1995 pirate romp Cutthroat Island. According to director Renny Harlin, who discussed the picture's failure in an interview years after the fact, studio Carolco was broke and distributor MGM was in trouble before the film even went into production — which Harlin knew would mean a nonexistent advertising budget.

"At that point I was left there with my then-wife, Geena Davis and myself, and a company that was already belly-up," Harlin recalled. "We begged to be let go. We begged that we didn't have to make this movie. And I don't think I've ever said this in any other interview. We begged that we not be put in this position." He went on to elaborate that Davis was "terrified" of headlining the film, knowing full well that a female-led pirate movie was "suicidal," but that due to contractual obligations they had no choice but to play ball. The film went on to gross a tenth of its $100 million budget, and — as Harlin now insists he knew all along — it was the last picture Carolco would ever make.