Movies That Flopped Because The Plot Didn't Make Any Sense

For every Hollywood picture that scores megabucks at the box office, there's at least one more that does the exact opposite. Film production and promotion is an inexact science, and in an industry which typically grosses north of $10 billion per year, there's a lot of money getting thrown at a lot of questionable projects. Movies that flop super hard do so for a lot of different reasons — perhaps the film's premise can't be tidily summed up by a standard marketing campaign (John Carter, Mortal Engines), or the filmmakers rely too heavily on a grab bag of cliches (The Darkest Minds), or the competition is just too stiff (anything that opens against an Avengers movie).

But then, there are those movies that simply confound audiences with their resolute refusal to tell anything resembling an intelligible story. Whether they have terminal problems at the screenplay stage, get thoroughly jumbled in editing, or even wind up missing huge chunks of what was supposed to be onscreen, the results are the same: confusion, annoyance, and anemic box office. These are some of those films — the giant flops that earned that status by virtue of simply making no damn sense.

Karyn Kusama is a talented director with a seeming knack for picking either very good projects or very, very bad ones. Her debut picture, 2000's boxing drama Girlfight, wowed critics with a confident approach to character development mixed with visceral, hard hitting fight scenes. More recently, her 2018 cop mystery Destroyer (featuring a near-unrecognizable Nicole Kidman as an L.A. police detective with a troubled past) has also earned accolades. But she also gave us the 2009 horror misfire Jennifer's Body, and before that, she presided over the trainwreck that was the 2005 adaptation of the iconic MTV animated series Aeon Flux.

Critics mercilessly bashed the film for its herky-jerky pacing and confusing story, but to be fair, this wasn't all Kusama's fault. Universal Studios essentially eviscerated her cut of the movie in an effort to make it more friendly to mainstream eyes, eliminating important story beats and destroying the film's pacing in the process. Theron, meanwhile, failed to fill in any of the blanks with her flat, non-emotive performance. To the actress' credit, she totally owned up to this in an interview with Variety. "I was never completely sold on the entire concept, but I really loved [Girlfight]," she said, "so I threw myself into that with the belief that she's a great filmmaker. And then we f****d it all up. I just don't think we really knew how to execute it. And it's disappointing, but it happens." The film failed to even recoup its $62 million budget.

The 1986 cult classic Highlander was a film in which all of the weirdo elements came together to create a bizarre, gonzo sensibility which was greater than the sum of its parts. The story of an immortal Scottish warrior (Christopher Lambert) who must face a challenge from a deadly enemy bent on enslaving the human race, the film featured a number of confusing plot elements (and casting elements, like Scottish actor Sean Connery as a French warrior with a Spanish name), but it got by on its high energy and winking sense of humor. For its 1991 sequel Highlander II: The Quickening, however, the filmmakers simply said the heck with energy and humor, and ramped up the confusion.

Roger Ebert's amazing half-star review valiantly attempted to make sense of all the weird time jumps and inconsistent plot contrivances but it was an exercise in futility. "They cannot die. In a sense," he wrote. "Actually, they can, but it depends." The venerable critic pegged it as "the most hilariously incomprehensible movie [he'd] seen in many a long day," a complete mess which leaps around in time and/or space whenever its narrative threatens to start making sense. The flick only managed about $15 million at the box office, suggesting that the original film should have stood by the assertion made in its famous tagline: "There can be only one."

If there's one filmmaker who has demonstrated an ability to eschew conventional plot structure in favor of abstract, surreal insanity, it's David Lynch. Even his most celebrated films (such as Eraserhead and Mullholland Drive) function more as dreamlike artworks than actual stories, but his utter confidence in his voice and vision compels audiences to come along for the ride. His daughter Jennifer, however, proved with her debut feature Boxing Helena that this quality decidedly does not run in the family.

The story of a surgeon who expresses his obsessive love for a woman by holding her prisoner in his home and amputating her arms and legs, the picture saw its first sign of trouble when would-be star Kim Basinger breached her contract to withdraw from the film, eventually ponying up a multi-million dollar settlement just to avoid starring in it. Then, the picture dropped to reviews which branded it a "grotesquely misconceived" piece of "schoolgirl surrealism," an "intellectually half-baked," unintentionally campy would-be psychodrama which was "unsuccessful in all of the various tones [Lynch] attempts." Its meandering, borderline-formless plot proved a challenge to the endurance of its audiences, and those who stuck around to the end were treated to the oldest twist in the book. Boxing Helena didn't even crack $2 million at the box office, and even though Lynch eventually proved to have much better films in her, its reception hobbled her career for years.

Once upon a time, producer Dean Devlin — along with producer/director Roland Emmerich — brought home the box office bucks by threatening the Earth with destruction. After making their name with 1994's Stargate, the pair followed up with the cultural phenomenon that was Independence Day, which elevated the disaster film by injecting a seemingly unstoppable force of world-destroying aliens. The pair then collaborated on the much-maligned 1998 reboot Godzilla, before Emmerich went solo with 2004's The Day After Tomorrow and 2009's 2012. In 2017, Devlin returned with his own solo project — Geostorm, his directorial debut, in which an evil villain threatens the world with environmental catastrophe by way of... weather satellites.

As ridiculous as that sounds, the film that Devlin (who also wrote the script) conjured up from this premise was not so much an ill-conceived disaster yarn as it was an actual disaster. Devlin apparently decided that a headache-inducing narrative was just what was needed to flesh out his story; said one review, "The plot, which stems from the seemingly simple idea of weather-controlling satellites going haywire, quickly becomes mired in confusing government allegiances, unclear character motivations and an evil plan so nonsensical that it renders almost every single action taken by a character in the film to be meaningless." Throw in bad acting and even worse CGI, and you had a recipe for a flop of the highest order: the $120 million dollar picture grossed $33 million domestically, losing somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. 

Oh, those Wachowskis. The filmmaking sisters' reputation for confusingly-plotted sci-fi weirdness was firmly cemented with their 2012 adaptation of the novel Cloud Atlas, a film which takes place across multiple time periods featuring an ensemble cast (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Hugo Weaving) who all play different characters throughout the eras. With a synopsis describing it in part as "an epic story of humankind," moviegoers knew they were in for a sprawling, expansive narrative — but when your film requires an insanely convoluted infographic just so that viewers can begin to get their heads around your story, you may be in trouble.

Critics were sharply divided on the film, with even those who praised its ambition admitting that it would take a second viewing (or third, or fourth) to even begin to bring its story into focus. Detractors simply found it maddening, detached, and — worst of all — boring, taking the Wachowskis to task for their faithfulness to the novel's borderline-unfilmable narrative. With a budget north of $100 million — one of the most expensive independent features ever produced — the film only managed about $130 million at the worldwide box office, making it one of the biggest flops of its year. Hanks, who in an interview said that working on the film "altered [his] entire consciousness" was nevertheless obliged to admit the obvious: "I've made an awful lot of movies," said the beloved actor, "that didn't make any sense."