The Biggest Movie Remake Box Office Bombs Ever

Remakes are a staple of Hollywood. They allow producers and financiers to take a seemingly known quantity and retool it with new faces and updated visuals, and they allow marketers to say to audiences, "Hey, remember this?" Under the best circumstances, it's a chance to minimize risk, giving the audience a new version of something they already know and love just enough that they wouldn't mind re-experiencing it. There's a reason Disney keeps cranking out remakes of its animated classics.

Sometimes, though, remakes just don't work at the box office. This happens for a number of reasons, from studio interference to inflated expectations to a film just landing at the wrong time. Very often, it turns out audiences just weren't as interested in a remake as certain studio minds thought they would be. Whatever the case, the history of Hollywood is full of remakes that absolutely crashed and burned at the box office. From horror remakes with scary box office returns to disaster films that turned into just plain disasters, here are some of the biggest remake flops of all time.

Sometimes, a remake of a well-received film with an intriguing premise seems like a great idea on paper, and everyone gets on board so quickly and passionately that studios can't see failure coming until they're in the middle of it. That seemed to be the case with Point Break, the 2015 remake of the 1991 action classic about a group of extreme athletes conducting heists under extreme conditions. International distributors entered a bidding war to get their hands on the film when it was announced, and the film was particularly well-suited to perform in China thanks to distribution agreements there.

Unfortunately, China is the only place Point Break seemed to perform well. The film grossed nearly $40 million there, almost a third of its eventual worldwide total of $133.7 million, which was not enough to make the film a success considering its $105 million budget and extensive marketing campaign. In the U.S., it opened on Christmas Day and barely cracked the top ten box office returns that weekend, eventually earning a domestic total of $28.7 million. Later, producer Andrew Kosove would comment that audiences "fundamentally rejected" the film.

Jack Finney's novel Body Snatchers has produced four film adaptations, and two of them are still hailed as classics: the 1956 film from director Don Siegel and the 1978 film from director Philip Kaufman. The primal fear of being replaced by someone who looks just like you (and the resulting paranoia such a phenomenon would cause) carries a universal appeal. There's no reason to think the story couldn't be retold yet again for a new generation and capitalize on those fears once more.

The 2007 film The Invasion tried to do just that, and it did so with the star power of Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig in the lead roles. Sadly, the film's production was notably troubled. It was originally set to premiere in the summer of 2006, but original director Oliver Hirschbiegel's cut was deemed unacceptable by the studio. Substantial rewrites were ordered (and done by the Wachowskis), and director James McTeigue was brought in to direct the new footage. The reshoots helped drive up the budget, and the studio assigned a new release date at the tail end of summer 2007. The Invasion arrived to a dismal $5.9 million opening weekend and pulled in just $40 million worldwide against a reported $80 million budget.

Of all the classic Universal Monsters, the Wolfman is one that's always kept a relatively low profile among moviegoers who aren't necessarily monster movie fanatics. He's not Dracula or Frankenstein's monster or even the Mummy, so a big-budget blockbuster reboot for the character was always going to be at least somewhat challenging. Still, Universal assembled a team of heavy-hitters for their 2010 film, drafting Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins to star, Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker to script, and special effects legend Rick Baker to provide visual effects, among other major talents. Sadly, the film ultimately fell apart during pre-production. Director Joe Johnston was hired as a replacement with just three weeks to prepare to shoot, and he later described the work environment as less than desirable.

"The production was a leaky, rudderless ship in a perfect storm suffering from bad decisions, infighting, reluctance of the powers-that-be to take responsibility, and too many under-qualified cooks in the kitchen," he recalled. Production issues (including various reshoots) drove the budget up from $100 million to $150 million, which meant that the film's $139 million worldwide box office total wasn't enough to carry it into the territory of a success.

Depending on who you ask, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian film starring Jason Momoa in the title role isn't really a remake, but instead a new interpretation of Robert E. Howard's iconic sword and sorcery character. The role is so tied to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan films in the 1980s, though, that it was hard not to see it as someone attempting to step into his shoes. Momoa seemed ripe for big-screen stardom, but the film just failed to land with either critics or audiences. It grossed a little more than $21 million domestically and hit a worldwide box office total of $48.8 million, against a reported budget of $90 million. Throw in promotional costs and that's a big loss.

"There's just a lot of things that came into it and sometimes the script just wasn't there," Momoa later said. "I just wanted take a stab at doing Conan and it's out of your control, you can only do so much. I feel like I bled over, and over and over to do the best I could. I feel like we represented him very well. The movie sometimes, it fell short... you can only show up as an actor and be the best you can be".