The Biggest Animated Movie Bombs Of All Time

In the modern world, animated movies are big business. According to The Numbers, a quarter of the 20 biggest movies of all time at the worldwide box office are fully-animated projects. Features told in the medium of animation have long been seen as a reliable way to make a buck, and that has never been more true than in the cinematic landscape of the 21st-century than now. 

However, that doesn't mean producing a project in animation means it'll be an automatic moneymaker. In fact, over the years, several animated movies have crashed and burned at the box office in a truly shocking manner. Tens of millions of dollars have been lost on the biggest animated box office bombs of all time, and the process of creating these productions can sometimes drain studios of money just as much as something like "Frozen" can print money for Disney.

There's no one way to make an animated movie, and there is not just one reason why an animated film tanks at the box office. Perhaps the marketing went awry, maybe the story didn't fit the pop culture zeitgeist, or there could've been problems with the project's distributor. These and countless other reasons help illuminate what went wrong with some of the biggest animated movie box office bombs. Here, we'll take a look at some of the biggest animated box-office disappointments of all time with an eye towards just what led each one astray.

Some animated movies disappoint at the box office. Some animated movies bomb at the box office. And then there are animated movies, like "Delgo," that make history with their financial woes. Dropping into movie theaters in December 2008, expectations were not high for the project given its tormented production and that micro-studio Freestyle Releasing was distributing it. However, nobody could've expected "Delgo" to score the worst opening weekend in history, at the time, for a movie debuting in over 2,000 theaters, grossing just $511,920 in its first three days of domestic release, according to Box Office Mojo.

After just seven days, "Delgo" was pulled from theaters, and the film wound up grossing just $694,782 at the box office, with its performance being so bad that it never scored an international theatrical release. It's difficult to properly fathom just how poorly "Delgo" did in its theatrical run, though a reminder that it carried a $40 million price tag should reinforce the sheer amount of money lost. Though there wasn't just one reason why this movie bombed, an awkward mid-December release date, placing "Delgo" right in between the releases of competing family titles like "Bolt" and "Marley and Me," certainly didn't help matters. 

Plus, action-oriented animation has often had a hard time attracting family moviegoers. Even Disney couldn't make explosion-laden features like "Treasure Planet" big hits. However, rarely has this subgenre delivered something that struggles as badly at the box office as "Delgo."

The independently produced sci-fi animated film "Battle for Terra" had to know the odds were against it when it dropped into movie theaters in May 2009. Marketed as an action-heavy project in a marketplace dominated by lucrative animated features about celebrity-voiced animals, "Battle for Terra" was a departure from the norm for successful animated motion pictures. It was also opening in only 1,161 theaters, a sharp contrast to the 4,000+ theater count of the average DreamWorks Animation. Shocking no one, "Battle for Terra" couldn't overcome these challenges and became a box office dud.

This production grossed just $6.3 million, only $1.6 million of which came from a very frontloaded domestic box office performance. This made it one of the lowest-grossing CG-animated films at the time, a stark reminder that creating a project in this medium of expression was not inherently a guarantee of success. Sources for the film's budget vary greatly, with some sources pegging it at $4 million while the director described it in an interview with Animation World Network as "under $20 million". 

Whatever the official cost, a professionally-produced CG animated film like "Battle for Terra" needed to make way more than $6.3 million to be seen as a profitable enterprise. The 2000s were not kind to animated sci-fi action films (see also: "Titan A.E." or "Atlantis: The Lost Empire"), and "Battle for Terra" capped off a poor decade for this subgenre on an appropriately disastrous note.

Throughout the 1980s, Don Bluth was on to something special. In an age when Walt Disney Animation Studios was running on autopilot, titles like "The Secret of NIMH" and "An American Tail" drew critical acclaim for delivering daring animation and poignant narratives. But just as Walt Disney Animation Studios recovered its mojo with titles like "The Little Mermaid," Bluth hit a creative rut in the 1990s. This was made apparent in his first directorial effort of the 1990s, "Rock-A-Doodle."

On an $18 million budget, "Rock-A-Doodle" grossed just $11.6 million. This pitiful result was significantly down from previous Don Bluth directorial efforts and barely came in ahead of the North American haul of "The Secret of NIMH" from a decade earlier. "Rock-A-Doodle" was always going to be held back by its distributor, Samuel Goldwyn Entertainment. While earlier Bluth movies were released by MGM and Universal Pictures, "Rock-A-Doodle" was handled by a studio that has only ever released seven titles that have cracked $10 million in North America. It's also worth noting that prior Bluth movies, like "All Dogs Go to Heaven" or "An American Tail," debuted over prime Thanksgiving release dates, a holiday that's often kind to family movies. By contrast, "Rock-A-Doodle" premiered in April, a month that's produced far fewer box office juggernauts.

Regardless of the reasons for this dismal performance, "Rock-a-Doodle" had a huge impact on Bluth's career, and Variety reports that his studio had to file for bankruptcy less than two years after the debut of this project.

Today, "The Iron Giant" is a universally beloved movie that has graduated from cult classic to a full-blown staple of modern pop culture. Major blockbusters like "Ready Player One" and "Space Jam: A New Legacy" feature the film's titular character in their trailers as a way of generating buzz. Meanwhile, beloved sitcom "Ted Lasso" heavily featured "The Iron Giant" as part of a movie night for the show's soccer players and even referenced how this movie can reduce anyone to tears. If you were looking over just its presence in the current pop culture landscape, it'd be easy to assume "The Iron Giant" was always beloved.

However, in its initial 1999 theatrical box office run, "The Iron Giant" was a shockingly major box office dud. On a $50 million budget, this Brad Bird directorial effort only took in $31.3 million, $23.1 million of which came from a lackluster North American run. In the years since its premiere, Bird spoke in an interview with JoBlo about how distributor Warner Bros. botched the project's release, particularly in how little marketing they gave the film. Meanwhile, the then-President of Warner, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, attributed the film's failure to the inherent difficulty in releasing smarter kid-skewing movies. 

Whatever the reasons for it, "The Iron Giant" was an indisputable box office dud, but it's managed to endure throughout the years to become an inescapable modern classic.

Today, there are tons of competitors to Disney's animated offerings, ranging from the works of Illumination studio to projects released by Netflix. The 1990s, though, were a different time, with several non-Disney cartoons released in this era coming up short at recapturing the Mouse House magic, as noted by the Los Angeles Times. Among those that tried and failed in this era was "The Swan Princess," which leaned hard on the Disney formula with its animated musical fairy tale based on the ballet "Swan Lake." Distributor New Line Cinema even gave the project a release tied to the Thanksgiving holiday during which Disney had premiered projects like "Beauty and the Beast."

"The Swan Princess" tried mighty hard to mimic animated movies from Disney — but one thing it couldn't quite replicate was that studios box office success. In fact, "The Swan Princess" cratered at the box office with just $9.8 million on a $21 million budget. The problems here were numerous, including the film's distributor, New Line Cinema, having minimal experience successfully releasing kid-friendly cartoons. A glut of animated fantasy musicals in the 1990s also kept "The Swan Princess" from standing out in the marketplace. Beyond that, Disney re-released "The Lion King" over Thanksgiving 1994 provided "The Swan Princess" with insurmountable competition. Though today the likes of "How to Train Your Dragon" can stand toe-to-toe with new Disney fare, 1990s projects like "The Swan Princess" got crushed by the Mouse House.

In retrospect, it's interesting that Robert Zemeckis got three separate swings at making movies entirely realized through motion-capture animation, especially since none of them were significant moneymakers. "The Polar Express" has turned into a holiday season fixture, but it didn't break even on its initial theatrical release, according to the Los Angeles Times, while the 2009 project "A Christmas Carol" was an outright box office bomb. In between those two Yuletide movies was "Beowulf," which saw Zemeckis using this filmmaking technique to realize a classic piece of fantasy literature.

Though the name "Beowulf" may be well-known, audiences weren't super interested in checking out a gritty modern take on the property. In its worldwide box office run, "Beowulf" took in only $195 million on a massive $150 million budget. That price tag is a key reason why "Beowulf" failed to be a success. At the time of "Beowulf's" release 2007, only 18 fantasy movies had cracked $400 million in the history of the global box office, according to data compiled by The Numbers. 

The track record of this genre just didn't justify "Beowulf's" $150 million costs, especially since it didn't have as famous of a brand name as "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter" in its title. Though it did a bit better than average for animated cinema that isn't rated G or PG, "Beowulf" still turned into one of the more costly animated movie box office duds of the modern age.