Why These 2019 Films Bombed At The Box Office

To say 2019 is a big year for movies is something of an understatement, if for no other reason than the staggering financial and critical success of Avengers: Endgame. Unfortunately, box office victory isn't always contagious; success for one film doesn't mean ticket sales will be anywhere near as impressive for another one. Quite a few 2019 movies with big names and big budgets have already received painfully disappointing thumbs downs from critics and audiences alike, and no genre seems immune. In spite of the triumphs of not only Endgame, but Shazam! and Captain Marvel — not to mention Glass, which made critics groan but still earned piles of dough — superhero comic book movies still aren't an automatic path to success, as the makers and backers of the rebooted Hellboy learned.

There's still plenty of 2019 to go — and plenty of movies to find either blockbuster success or a much quicker trip to the discount DVD bin. But among the lessons moviemakers should have learned and written down in 2019, some of the biggest are 1) Good writing is key, 2) Don't get bigger than your budget, and 3) maybe don't hire Matthew McConaughey. If you'd like to learn the sources of these hard-learned lessons, enjoy our diagnosis of the biggest movie bombs of 2019. 

Not to worry, Joss Whedon fans: we aren't confused. The Serenity of 2019 is a very different animal than the big-screen extension of Whedon's Firefly, though they both do feature captains.

The captain of this year's Serenity is Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), and his vessel is a fishing boat instead of a spaceship. Dill is dragged back into the world of his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) when she tries to hire him to kill her current husband, Frank (Jason Clarke). But ... not really. Because we soon learn Dill is a character in a video game designed by the young Patrick (Rafael Sayegh). Dill is based on Patrick's dead father, and his game was originally very different. But when Patrick's mother remarries an abusive man, the son redesigns the game to be all about Dill killing his ex-wife's husband. 

Some critics, like Brandon Collins of the Medium Popcorn podcast, praised a number of fine performances that nevertheless failed to save an absurd story. Most critics agreed Serenity's script was horribly written and its premise was ludicrous. The biggest problem seems to be the film's poorly executed reveals, which Edward Porter of the Sunday Times called "shoddy narrative gimmicks." Rather than adding depth or a fresh perspective to the story, reviewers felt the twists were "self-indulgent" and likened them to the director crashing through the screen, laughing at the audience, "and telling you you've been had." 

A remake of a 2011 Spanish film with the same name, 2019's Miss Bala stars Gina Rodriguez of Jane the Virgin fame. The film brings Rodriguez to unfamiliar territory, casting her as a Los Angeles make-up artist who trains to combat a Mexican drug cartel after her friend is kidnapped during a trip south of the border. 

While the choice of casting Rodriguez as an action star may seem strange, most critics seem to agree it's just about the only thing that ended up going right with Miss Bala — the general consensus of reviewers is that this would-be thriller is merely a watered down, uninspired, and cardboard cutout version of the 2011 film it remakes. Dustin Chase of the Galveston Daily News wrote that Miss Bala director Catherine Hardwicke "feels more like a director for hire" than in her previous "films of substance, or at least zeitgeist." No doubt partly as a result of all the bad critical buzz, Miss Bala's gross just barely broke even with its $15 million budget.

In spite of its poor performance critically, a number of critics saved space to praise Rodriguez's performance in their reviews. While agreeing Miss Bala was a ho-hum flick, Bilge Ebiri of Rolling Stone wrote that the film "proves that Rodriguez has the makings of a true movie star." Hopefully, the Jane the Virgin lead will get the chance to rise above this year's stinker with richly deserved roles in future projects.

In the world of Captive State, 2019 is the year aliens invade the Earth, ultimately leading to humanity's capitulation to the extraterrestrials who rule the planet from their underground "Closed Zones." A decade later, two brothers whose parents were murdered by alien soldiers are involved in a resistance force against the aliens called Phoenix. A former friend of the brothers' dead father, Police Commander Mulligan (John Goodman), pursues the brothers, knowing that — contrary to popular belief — Phoenix is still an active threat. By the end of the film, a series of twists and turns reveals that some of the characters' loyalties are not what they appear to be.

Captive State eventually grossed an unimpressive $8.6 million worldwide and critics seem fairly unanimous about why this long-delayed sci-fi thriller deserved to be so roundly ignored by audiences. Overall, reviews echoed a sentiment that the plot was convoluted and that the film didn't have the budget it needed to tell its story. MovieCrypt's Kevin A. Ranson writes that Captive State has "too much story to tell with no affordable way to tell it." Chauncey K. Robinson of People's World says that because of "scattered plotting, we never get to dive too deeply" into the most relevant subjects the story raises. Many felt the focus on the unwieldy plot sacrificed believable characters, saying that "Characterization is perfunctory and unsatisfactory. We're watching a bunch of pawns on a filmmaker's chessboard." 

In spite of mostly positive reviews, Missing Link is the first animated feature to miss the box office cut and end up on our list of flops. The yeti Susan (Zach Galifianakis) is found in the Pacific Northwest by Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman). Susan, Frost, and Frost's old romantic partner Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana) embark on a quest to unite Susan with other yeti in the Himalayas.

While it got thumbs up from critics, Missing Link didn't just do badly — it made history. Cartoon Brew says that with its opening weekend gross of $5.8 million, Missing Link had the lowest opening ever for a film released in more than 3,200 theaters. It was also the lowest grossing release for the stop-motion animation studio Laika, whose first film — 2009's Coraline — enjoyed a worldwide gross of $75.3 million, compared to Missing Link's $16.2 million. 

Laika has taken modern animation in creatively satisfying new directions in the past, but they may actually be the problem. Shannon Gormley of Williamette Week points out that Missing Link's poor performance is part of a Laika trend, with each successive new movie from the studio performing under its predecessor. Keeping this in mind and paying attention to those few critics who panned Missing Link paints the picture of a studio that's lost its edge. Adam Graham of the Detroit News praised the film's animation, but criticized its more mainstream feel, writing "Laika films need to let their freak flag fly. Missing Link is only at half-staff." Likewise, Film Frenzy's Matt Brunson said that the film "has a distinctive look and plenty of heart, but true invention is noticeably MIA."

In a universe where dolls are tailor-made for specific children, Uglyville is the receptacle for the ones too strange to survive the Institute of Perfection's standards. In UglyDolls, one of the toys dumped in Uglyville, named Moxy (Kelly Clarkson), leads her friends to the outside world to find out what exists beyond their town. Sounds like an okay premise, right? Anthropomorphic toys, singing, plenty of laughs, a good message to kids that being different isn't bad, etc. What could go wrong? 

According to the critics, very little went right. Their various burns of UglyDolls label it as "bland" and "mind-numbing." UglyDolls may say it's about celebrating difference, but reviewers didn't think it reflected that. Louisa Moore of Screen Zealots mused, "How ironic that a film intended to celebrate our differences is so bland and poorly animated that it, too, becomes a forgettable face in the crowd." Another common complaint is that, while we all know movies aimed at kids work hard for the merchandise revenue, UglyDolls seemed to be doing nothing but advertising its merch. At RogerEbert.com, Nell Minow wrote that UglyDolls wasn't so much a movie as it was "an infomercial for the plush Hasbro toys." Joey Oleksinski of the New York Post theorized, rather than UglyDolls' supposed message of "Be Yourself," "the real takeaway here is 'Buy our merch!'" 

Parents seemed to pick up on all this, and as a result, UglyDolls pulled in a worldwide gross of $19.7 million — not even half its budget of $45 million.

Poms — a comedy about a group of older women in a retirement community who start up a competitive cheerleading squad — had some serious competition right out of the gate. Released the same weekend as Pokémon Detective Pikachu and another all-female-led comedy, The Hustle, Poms also faced Avengers: Endgame, which was still busy breaking records. Factor in the skew towards an older audience which, as Forbes' Scott Mendelson points out, tends to show up "when they have the time, not over the opening weekend," the movie's limping opening weekend gross of $5.6 million isn't that much of a surprise. 

Regardless of its target demographic or its stiff competition, Poms didn't seem to impress the few people who decided to show up anymore than it did the people in the next theater watching Pikachu solve crimes. With an embarrassing Rotten Tomatoes score of 32%, Poms apparently gave critics a great cast burdened with lazy writing. For example, Matt Brunson of Film Frenzy praises the cast for investing "their roles with genuine vitality," while at the same time calls the comedy "anemic" and the story's conflicts "artificially manufactured." Likewise Josh Terry of Deseret News gave a thumbs up to the acting chops of Diane Keaton and Jacki Weaver, while acknowledging "a feeling that they could have used some better material and execution."

Fox's X-Men series wasn't supposed to end this way. Dark Phoenix was supposed to be epic, a proper adaptation of one of the most iconic storylines in all of Marvel comics history (one that was already botched badly and given short shrift in 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand). Disney acquired the film and television assets of Fox in early 2019, meaning that the X-Men are destined to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some point — but Fox could have given their series, which ran for nearly two decades and twelve films, a mind-bending sendoff. So what went wrong?

It wasn't just one thing. The flick's third act famously had to be extensively retooled due to similarities to Marvel Studios' Captain Marvel, and much of the cast — including star Sophie Turner — were rightly accused of phoning it in by the critics that lambasted the film. But Dark Phoenix was also the final entry in a franchise that had been producing diminishing returns since the younger version of the principal cast was introduced with 2011's well-received X-Men: First Class. While 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past successfully traded in nostalgia by merging the older and younger mutants, 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse served as a less-inspired direct sequel to First Class, and the flick annoyed critics and underperformed at the box office — setting up Dark Phoenix for an epic failure. Perhaps if the film had simply been better, it could have avoided its fate — but it was, unfortunately, simply terrible.

On paper, Stuber sounded like a pretty safe bet: a buddy comedy starring Guardians of the Galaxy's Dave Bautista and the extremely funny Kumail Nanjiani, produced for a modest $25 million dollars and slated for release smack dab in the middle of the summer. Reviews were mixed-to-poor, but that's usually a fairly easy thing for comedies to overcome; the flick's $30 million dollar marketing push shrewdly targeted mostly men, with action-heavy spots that aired during the NBA finals and WrestleMania.

But the film's biggest liability was one that could not be overcome: it was produced by Fox Studios before the acquisition by Disney, and once the House of Mouse took stewardship of the film, it basically refused to throw good money before bad. The prevailing wisdom among Disney's brass, according to CEO Bob Iger, was that Fox Studios' slate of films had underperformed severely in recent years. So, while Disney was happy to have all that sweet intellectual property and massive back catalog of Fox programming to add to its upcoming Disney+ streamer, the lame duck pictures awaiting release after the acquisition weren't going to be given priority. 

Weak word of mouth and surprisingly strong competition from Alexandre Aja's bonkers horror flick Crawl sealed the fate of Stuber, which managed only a $32 million dollar worldwide gross and continued the recent trend of theatrical comedies getting a big, fat cold shoulder from audiences.

It wasn't at all clear whether audiences even wanted another installment in the Shaft series, which fielded three entries starring Richard Roundtree as the "black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks" in the '70s, and was revitalized with a 2000 entry starring Samuel L. Jackson as the legendary P.I.'s son. Nearly 20 years later, Jackson and Roundtree returned for a multi-generational teamup which also included the talented Jessie T. Usher as J.J. Shaft, the son of Jackson's character — but rather than giving moviegoers an updated take on the franchise, Shaft 2019 hearkened back to its roots in all of the worst ways.

Critics found the film to be jaw-droppingly regressive, with misogynistic and homophobic streaks each a mile wide; its outdated aesthetic wasn't helped by a flimsy, predictable plot and a troubling reliance on stereotypes that that haven't played well for decades. Shaft is a case in which a film's failure can't be chalked up to anything other than what's right there on the surface; the flick was simply an awful, borderline depressing waste of time, so bad that studio New Line dumped the film straight to Netflix internationally. The flick failed to even make back its meager $30 million dollar budget, proving that — contrary to a rightfully widely-held popular belief — it takes more than Samuel L. Jackson to make an awesome, profitable picture.

If any performer's talents have ever been wasted so egregiously as those of Melissa McCarthy, we'd like to hear about it. Since cleaning up at the box office with Bridesmaids in 2011, the actress has taken on a laundry list of disastrous projects: Identity Thief, Tammy, Spy, The Boss, Life of the Party, and The Happytime Murders all struck out with critics and audiences alike. The unfortunate trend continues with The Kitchen, which stars McCarthy, the similarly unlucky TIffany Haddish, and The Handmaid's Tale's Elisabeth Moss as a trio of mob wives who take over the family business after their husbands land in prison.

Making her feature directorial debut, writer/director Andrea Berloff (Straight Outta Compton) shouldered the blame from critics for the flick's wildly inconsistent tone, and her screenplay also came under heavy fire for accomplishing the difficult task of making consummate pros McCarthy and Haddish look like rank amateurs. The flick's fortunes were also hampered by its similarity to the recent (and much better) heist drama Widows, and its competition for box office dollars included the likes of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, Disney's live-action remake of The Lion King, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the feature adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It all added up to one big grease fire for The Kitchen, which came up far short of even making back half of its $38 million dollar budget. 

Lucy in the Sky may have actually been hurt by the fact that the story being told onscreen wasn't nearly as interesting as the true one that inspired it. The feature directorial debut of Legion and Fargo mastermind Noah Hawley, the flick was loosely based on the real-life story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, who famously drove cross-country wearing a diaper to confront her former boyfriend's new lover. For the movie, her name was changed to the somewhat unlikely "Lucy Cola" — one of a string of nonsensical decisions that, despite a game performance by star Natalie Portman, ultimately rendered the film a jumbled mess.

The movie was absolutely ripped to shreds by critics, most of whom found it to be interminably boring, and many of whom were confounded by the strange choices — such as the constant changing of the picture's aspect ratio — made by Hawley, who was roundly judged to have bitten off more than he could chew. The flick also happened to open on October 4, and any chances it might have had of igniting conversation were summarily squashed by the fact that Joker, by far the most talked-about film of the fall, opened on the same day. On its opening weekend, Lucy in the Sky opened in limited release to a take of just over $54,000 dollars — and no, that is not a typo.

Waiting decades to make a sequel to a beloved film is always a tricky endeavor; just ask the filmmakers behind Blade Runner 2049, a very good movie that underperformed severely at the box office. Doctor Sleep, adapted from Stephen King's 2013 sequel to his classic novel The Shining, positioned itself as a continuation of Stanley Kubrick's much-adored 1980 film version of that novel — and while this certainly seems like a sure-fire formula for box office gold, the movie's shockingly poor performance illustrated that, decent reviews aside, audiences were simply uninterested in picking up with an adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) nearly four decades after Kubrick's film hit screens.

To be fair, Doctor Sleep debuted during a Veterans' Day weekend during which it seemed that nobody could be bothered to get off their duffs to go to a movie. Roland Emmerich's historical drama Midway won the weekend with a measly $17.5 million dollars, and the overall box office dropoff from the same frame in the past few years was precipitous. But as was the case with Terminator: Dark Fate, it seemed that younger audiences simply didn't give a rip about a sequel to a movie that probably came out before their parents were even old enough to see it. With September's It: Chapter Two failing to hit the heights of its 2017 predecessor, it could also be that the Stephen King Renaissance is winding down — adding up to a perhaps the biggest mid-budget flop of the year.

Clint Eastwood is normally a reliable director of fairly profitable mid-budget prestige films, and the fact that Richard Jewell — a biopic of the man falsely accused of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing — was released during the holiday season should have virtually guaranteed a decent box office performance. The film, though, faced trouble on multiple fronts: first, it opened on December 13, putting it up against Jumanji: The Next Level, a sequel to a film that made nearly a billion dollars in 2017 despite being in direct competition with Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Second, the flick's depiction of one of its few female characters — Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs, portrayed by Olivia Wilde — garnered it the wrong kind of attention before it was even released.

Specifically, the flick depicted Scruggs offering sexual favors to a source for information, which prompted the Journal-Constitution to issue a scathing statement prior to the film's debut in theaters. The statement was sent to Eastwood, his screenwriter Billy Ray, studio Warner Bros., and its lawyers; Wilde publicly proclaimed that it was never her intention to portray Scruggs (who died in 2001) in this fashion, but the damage was done (via CBS News). The movie dropped to absolutely paltry box office, and the rest of the month — which saw Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker released on December 20 — wasn't any kinder.

Director Tom Hooper won an Oscar for directing the Broadway adaptation Les Miserables, but his second crack at bringing a beloved stage play to the screen didn't go quite as well. Sure, the bizarre premise and loose narrative of Cats isn't exactly a great fit for a movie, and Hooper's film opened the same day as Rise of Skywalker, portending an uphill battle. These, however, were the least of its problems. 

When the flick's first trailer was released in the summer, the internet certainly lit up with buzz — of exactly the wrong kind. Rather than employing the stage makeup and prosthetics of the stage play, Hooper chose to use CGI to render his formidable cast — which included the likes of Dame Judi Dench, Idris Elba, and Taylor Swift — as horrifying human/cat hybrids. Hooper promised that the effects were a work in progress, and he wasn't whistling Dixie; two days after Cats' release, a new version with "improved visual effects" was made available to venues by studio Universal, due to some glitchy and confounding errors of the type one would not expect to find in a $100 million dollar movie, but in a rushed video game release. The insane spectacle of Cats seems destined to become legend for all of the wrong reasons — but it may yet recoup some of its production costs when released to home video, thanks to morbid curiosity and/or recreational drugs.