Not every movie has what it takes to become a box office blockbuster. Sometimes that comes down to bad timing, bad marketing, or an audience that simply wasn’t ready for it. After all, plenty of movies now considered classics struggled when they were first released. The Thing, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, and even Citizen Kane all failed to set the box office on fire.
So today, we’re looking at some huge box-office bombs, and while these movies may have flopped financially, they’re still worth a second look.
Cutthroat Island (1995)
Budget: $98-115M
Box Office: $16M
Estimated Loss: $105M
Cutthroat Island is infamous as one of the biggest flops in movie history, with its failure leading Carolco Pictures to declare bankruptcy. The production was plagued by delays, rewrites, and accidents, which sent the budget soaring. Is the film perfect? Not by a long shot, but it’s a fun pirate adventure that audiences largely dismissed at the time.
Filled with practical stunts, massive set pieces, and sword fights, this is the type of large-scale swashbuckling spectacle that Hollywood rarely makes anymore. Geena Davis is terrific as the action heroine, with Matthew Modine as the roguish love interest. Michael Douglas was originally slated to play the male lead, but dropped out before filming began, leading to a scramble for a replacement. Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis and more all turned down the role before Modine agreed to sign on.
The film feels like an old-fashioned adventure serial made on a massive budget, and it’s far more enjoyable than its legendary failure would suggest. It did scare studios away from pirate-themed blockbusters for years, with the genre not truly returning until Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
The 13th Warrior (1999)
Budget: $100-160M
Box Office: $61.7M
Estimated Loss: $69-129M
Another notoriously troubled production, The 13th Warrior went through several rounds of re-edits and reshoots before it was finally released. Critics hated it at the time, but the film has rightfully become a cult classic over the years. I vividly recall watching it for the first time and being completely freaked out by the cannibalistic Wendol warriors.
With muddy villages, torchlit battles, and more than its fair share of blood and guts, the film has atmosphere for days, as you would expect from director John McTiernan, the man who gave us Predator and Die Hard. Antonio Banderas plays an outsider who is forced to join a band of Viking warriors against a mysterious enemy. Once the quest begins, it becomes a straightforward, muscular action film with a surprisingly strong sense of brotherhood and momentum.
Of course, not everyone vibed with the film, including Omar Sharif, who played an old friend of Banderas’ character. In fact, he found the project to be so terrible that he temporarily retired from acting. “After my small role in The 13th Warrior, I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well,’” he explained. “I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.“
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Budget: $175M
Box Office: $148.7M
Estimated Loss: $112-150M
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword may not be the definitive Arthurian epic, but director Guy Ritchie turns the familiar legend into a swaggering fantasy crime movie, complete with fast-talking banter, kinetic editing, giant beasts, dark magic, and a surprisingly gritty underdog energy. It’s messy, sure, but it’s rarely boring. Charlie Hunnam makes for a solid streetwise Arthur, Jude Law clearly enjoys playing the villain, and the whole thing is more entertaining than other failed franchise starters.
The film was meant to be the first in a six-film franchise, but the sequels were naturally scrapped after the first film tanked at the box office. Again, it’s not perfect, and you get the sense that there’s a better story lurking on the periphery, but it’s good fun.
Hunnam is still fond of King Arthur, but has said that he’d like to take another crack at it. “I’d like to go back to King Arthur because there’s a lot of things went wrong during that and a lot of things that were out of our control,” he said. “I just don’t think we ended up matching the aspiration — we just didn’t quite make the movie we wanted. The idea was that if it was a success, we would’ve made several of those films, and I’m really captivated by the Arthurian legends and I just feel like we really missed an opportunity to tell a long-form story.“
Hugo (2011)
Budget: $150-170M
Box Office: $185.8M
Estimated Loss: $90-100M
It’s strange to think of Hugo as a box-office disappointment, because it’s easily one of Martin Scorsese’s most heartfelt movies. On the surface, it looks like a children’s adventure about an orphan living in a train station, but it gradually reveals itself as a love letter to cinema. The film is gorgeous to look at, full of warmth, and packed with affection for the magic of early filmmaking. It may have been a hard sell to mainstream audiences expecting a simpler family movie, but taken on its own terms, Hugo is moving, beautifully crafted, and one of the rare modern films that genuinely captures the wonder of the movies.
Hugo is easily the most critically acclaimed film on this list, landing on numerous top-ten lists and scoring 11 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
The film was shot in 3D, which producer Graham King said contributed to the soaring budget. “Budget-wise, there just wasn’t enough prep time and no one really realized how complicated doing a 3D film was going to be,” he said. “I went through three line-producers because no one knew exactly what was going on. Do I still think it’s a masterpiece that will be talked about in 20 years? Yes. But once the schedule started getting out of whack, things just spiraled and spiraled and that’s when the avalanche began.“
Speed Racer (2008)
Budget: $120M
Box Office: $93.9M
Estimated Loss: $100M
Fresh off The Matrix trilogy, audiences were curious to see what the Wachowskis would do next, but Speed Racer was widely dismissed when it hit theaters. However, time has been kind to the film. The Wachowskis didn’t try to make a grounded version of the original cartoon; they made a live-action anime, and that’s exactly why it works. The colours are huge, the emotions are sincere, and the racing sequences are completely wild in a way few blockbusters even attempt. It’s a movie that looks like nothing else, which probably hurt it commercially at the time, but now feels like one of its biggest strengths. Beneath all the visual chaos, you’ll find a surprisingly earnest story about family, integrity, and refusing to sell out.
Emile Hirsch, who starred as Speed Racer, is grateful that the film has finally found its audience. “When it came out, it was unanimously dogged…I remember we were all like, ‘Man, this movie is so good. How come nobody gets it?’,” he recalled. “That was sort of our perspective. But then we were also like, ‘Are we the crazy ones?’ Because it’s the public and the critics…So it’s really validating to have everybody come around all these years later.“
The comment section exists to allow readers to discuss the article constructively and respectfully, focused on the topic at hand.
What’s Not Allowed