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Podcast Transcript
As people in the entertainment industry like to say, show business is “show business.”
As much as motion pictures are an art form, it is also a business. In many cases, a very big business.
Motion picture studios will often invest hundreds of millions of dollars into a film expecting to see a return on their investment.
Most of the time, a film will break even. However, in a few spectacular cases, a disastrous film has ruined a studio.
Learn more about box office bombs and some of the worst-performing movies in history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Before I go any further, this episode is not about the worst movies of all time. That would be a highly subjective list. Even though there are ways to take an objective approach to determine what the worst movies are, such as looking at IMDB or RottenTomatoes rankings, it’s still a pretty subjective list.
Also, there are bad movies and there are movies so bad they are good. Some bad movies can still be quite successful and are not box office bombs at all.
So, in this episode, I want to focus on films that were financial disasters. In most cases, films that performed poorly at the box office were also pretty bad. However, this hasn’t always been the case.
In terms of nominal box office losses, almost all of the biggest box office bombs have occurred in the last ten years. This is more a function of inflation than anything else. Over time, production costs have increased, meaning that anything with a large production budget can potentially have enormous losses.
However, if you adjust for inflation, there are films from years past that were just as devastating to the studios that financed them, even if the numbers aren’t as large.
So, with that, let’s start with the film that is considered to be one of the first major box office bombs: D. W. Griffith’s 1918 silent film epic Intolerance.
Griffith released Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is widely considered to be one of the first true epic films. It was a retelling of the story of the creation of the Klu Klux Klan. The film was a box office smash, earning tens of millions of dollars with a production budget of only about $100,000.
However, it was a horribly racist film. Its depictions of black people was at the level of a ministerial show. The NAACP condemned the film, and it was believed to have inspired a resurgence of the Klan soon after the film was released.
In response to his critics, he created his next film about Intolerance throughout history.
The film was massive, with an initial run time of 3.5 hours. Its production budget was $375,000, almost four times that of Birth of a Nation and the most ever spent on a film at that point.
Film reviewers praised the film, which is still considered to be one of the greatest films of the silent era today.
However, it didn’t have a fraction of the box office success that Birth of a Nation did. We don’t have accurate box office data from 1918, but at best, the film only recouped its initial investment.
How did such an anticipated film that was highly praised perform so poorly? It was largely considered to be because of when the film was released. The United States was in the middle of the first world war and the public wasn’t interested in a film about peace and intolerance.
The next film that was a box office bomb is one that might surprise you. It is also considered one of the greatest films of all time and it had a high profile cast and director.
It is the 1946 film It’s A Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart.
The film was the first by the production company Liberty Films. Liberty films was created by the directors Frank Capra, William Wyler, and Samuel J. Briskin.
They banked a lot on the film, spending $3.3 million on production. Factoring in marketing and other expenses, the film needed about $6 million to break even.
The film only made about $3 million at the box office, forcing Liberty Films to accept a buyout offer from Paramount Pictures. It’s A Wonderful Life, in addition to being the studio’s first film, also turned out to be the studio’s last film.
How did this box office flop become one of the most beloved movies of all time? It was due to a clerical error in 1974 when trying to extend the copyright.
The film accidentally wound up in the Public Domain, which made it an attractive option for television stations to play in the 1980s and 90s.
Both of the films I’ve mentioned so far failed because of poor ticket sales.
For a film to fail financially, it is a matter of being unprofitable, and profit is a function of both revenues and expenses. The film that proved you could be a disaster even if you did well at the box office is the 1963 film, Cleopatra.
Cleopatra was a big-budget film. It starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton.
The film was the most expensive ever produced at the time, costing 20th Century Fox $44 million dollars. The problem was the initial budget was only supposed to be $2 million.
Taylor commanded a salary of $1 million, which was the highest in Hollywood then. The production was plagued with problems and cost overruns.
They had to switch directs in the middle of the film. Taylor insisted on filming in international locations. The cost of the film just kept going up and up.
The surprising thing is that in 1963, it was the biggest box office attraction. It made more money than any other film. However, the cost overruns made it impossible to break even.
Cleopatra almost ruined 20th Century Fox. It didn’t quite put them out of business, but they were forced to sell 300 acres of its studio backlot in Los Angeles.
By 1966, the film was still $3 million shy of breaking even, which they finally did after they sold the television rights.
Just one year later, Samuel Bronston Productions suffered a disaster with their own historical epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire.
Again, it had a star-studded cast with Sophia Loren, Alec Guinness, James Mason, Stephen Boyd, Christopher Plummer, Omar Sharif, and Mel Ferrer.
The total cost of production was only $19 million, less than half that of Cleopatra. However, it did not do well at the box office at all.
Total box office receipts only reached $4.75 million, resulting in Samuel Bronston Productions going bankrupt.
I’ve seen The Fall of the Roman Empire just because I’m a sucker for 1960s epic films, and it’s OK, but it isn’t nearly the same as other similar films made during that period.
One of the biggest box office bombs of all time became infamous for how much money it lost. It ruined the career of its director and the studio that produced it: The 1980 film Heaven’s Gate.
Heaven’s Gate was directed by Michael Cimino, who won the Academy Award for Best Director in 1978 for The Deer Hunter. The film was to be an epic loosely based on the Johnson County wars in Wyoming in the 1890s. The cast included Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Kris Kristofferson, Sam Waterston, and Jeff Bridges.
The film was already behind schedule just days into production, and costs started escalating. Cimino was a perfectionist who ran the film set like a dictator. He reshot several scenes multiple times.
The original $7 million dollar budget exploded to $44 million for the studio United Artists.
When Cimino finally had something, he delivered a five-hour and twenty-five-minute version of the film, which he said would be cut by only fifteen minutes.
United Artists refused to release a five-hour movie, so Cimino cut the film down to just 3 hours and 29 minutes.
That was then edited down to just two hours and 29 minutes, which was the version that finally hit the theaters.
The film reviews were so bad that it became known as one of the worst movies in history. The reputation of the film became so bad so quickly that people didn’t show up. It earned only $3.5 million at the box office, not even remotely coming close to recouping its production costs.
It was such a disaster that United Artists was sold by its parent company Transamerica.
Cimino directed just four more movies over the next twenty-five years, and he was never again given such control or a budget like he had for Heaven’s Gate.
The film is credited for shifting Hollywood’s entire approach to movie making, moving away from director-driven films and towards high-concept films like Star Wars and Jaws, both of which were box office successes.
In 2004 and 2016, director’s cuts of the film were released that were closer to the original 3.5-hour version. More film critics came to appreciate the film, with a few even calling it a lost classic.
However, the damage had been done.
In 1987, Columbia Pictures released what was to become one of the other highest-profile bombs in history, Ishtar.
Pitched as a buddy road trip movie, it starred Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. The writer and director of the film was Elaine May, who had previously helped both actors and who felt indebted to her.
The original budget was $27.5 million dollars, but it ballooned to $51 million. Filming in Morocco was difficult and the problems that they had shooting became legendary.
When the film was released it received scathing reviews and like Heaven’s Gate, it was put in the category as one of the worst movies of all time.
It earned only $14.4 million dollars at the box office.
The performance was so bad that Coca-Cola, the owners of Columbia, ended up selling the company to Sony.
Hollywood began to move more and more towards the creation of blockbuster movies, which sold a lot of tickets but also required higher budgets, which meant that if a movie bombed, the losses could be staggering.
This happened in 1995 with the production of Cutthroat Island by the independent film studio Carolco Pictures.
The film starred Geena Davis and Matthew Modine and its hope was to bring back swashbuckling pirate movies.
As with so many of the movies I’ve mentioned, there were problems with production. There were multiple script and casting changes. Almost every major male movie star in Hollywood turned down the role before it was given to Matthew Modine. Geena Davis tried to get out of the film but contractually couldn’t.
The film ended up costing $98 million dollars but only made $14 million at the box office.
Adjusted for inflation, the Guiness Book of World Records lists it as being the biggest box office bomb of all time.
The 21st century has seen an explosion in the production cost of major Hollywood pictures. As a result, there has been a proliferation of movies that have lost more than $100 million dollars.
The exact accounting for each movie makes it difficult to know just how much money was lost, especially because promotional and marketing expenses can vary so much, but some of the numbers are staggering.
The 2012 film John Carter may have lost over $200 million dollars as did the 2013 flop the Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp.
2018’s Mortal Engines by Peter Jackon the 2023 MCU movie The Marvels both also lost over $200 million.
I want to end the episode by not examining total losses for a film but by examining which movie had the worst overall box office receipts regardless of production budget.
That distinction is held by a 2006 film starring Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore called Zyzzyx Road.
I don’t blame you if you haven’t heard of it before. The production cost of the film was only $1.2 million.
The producers of the film didn’t want to release the film domestically until it had a foreign release. However, Screen Actors Guild requirements mandated a domestic release.
So, to honor the union requirements, the film paid a theater in Dallas, Texas, one thousand dollars to show the film at noon every day for one week. Zero money was spent on marketing or advertising.
Tickets cost $5.
After its one-week run, it had achieved total box office receipts of…….$30.
Six people had paid money to see the film; two of those were the makeup artist on the film who saw it with her friend, and they had their $10 refunded by the producer, so the net box office proceeds was only $20.
An international release never happened, and the film went directly to DVD.
In an odd twist, just days before recording this episode, a 2-Disc Collector’s Edition 4K Ultra blu ray version of Zyzzyx Road was just announced. The price for the film?
$39.95. The cost of a single Blu-Ray is more than the entire film’s box office receipts.
Given the increasing production costs of films, we have probably not seen the end of big box office bombs. Because of increased costs due to inflation, some movies now approach half a billion dollars in total cost for production and marketing.
If such a movie were to flop at the theaters, we might soon witness the first film to lose over $300 million dollars at the box office.