JamesG
08-20-2009, 04:59 AM
We crunched the box office receipts and weighed them against our esteemed assessments, and what we've come up with is a list of the most profitable movies that aren't worth the celluloid they were printed on -- or at least the millions they earned at the box office. (Minimum take to make our list: $100 mil.) Looking for some themes? Start with sequels, superheroes and scientific inaccuracy ... -- By Adam Duerson
25. Armageddon (1998)
Nothing in this appropriately dubbed disaster pic makes anything close to scientific sense, right down to the plan to divert a Texas-sized asteroid by digging a hole in it and blowing it up. And when we finally got over our wasted 10 bucks, there was Steven Tyler moaning the movie's theme, 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing,' on the radio for the next six months. Roger Ebert put it best: "No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 40%
• Box Office Gross: $201 million
24. Bad Boys II (2003)
The first chapter in this urbanized buddy cop story was far from perfect, watchable mostly due to the undeniable charm and chemistry of its fast-talking leads, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But it's a masterpiece compared to the follow-up, which came a highly unnecessary eight years later. Overblown, under-funny and Michael Bay-ed beyond belief (one scene involving a car chase that mows down half of a third-world village is particularly repulsive), it's 'Bad' alright. And not meaning good.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 23%
• Box Office Gross: $138 million
23. Wild Hogs (2007)
You can easily picture the get-together, perhaps at a BBQ, where Tim Allen convinced John Travolta, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence (surely the easiest sell) to come over to the dark side of "make-a-quick-buck" filmmaking. Pile on top of that foundation a midlife-crisis theme, motorcycles, lots of leather and some tasteless homophobia jokes and there you have all the makings of a ... "make-a-quick-buck" flick.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 14%
• Box Office Gross: $168 million
22. Spider Man 3 (2007)
... But part 3 could have been sooo good! The lead actors were back, as was director Sam Raimi, with two of the coolest Spidey villains and a $258 million budget to blow through. Easy peasy, right? Raimi messed that all up with questionable casting -- spindly Topher Grace as Venom -- and by heaping on a third antagonist (an overacting James Franco) plus equal amounts of lovey dovey drama, over-the-top humor and, most grievously, an evil Peter Parker cool-catting down the street (this is how a splatter-horror guru depicts "dark"?).
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 62%
• Box Office Gross: $336 million
21. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
Clearly somebody at 20th Century Fox doesn't get the allure of Wolverine. He's mysterious; a loner. And that's the way we like it. An origins story about the ornery cigar chomper was the last thing any self-respecting X-Men fan ever asked for. But there it was ... And there it went, disappearing from screens while barely recouping its expenses. Just to prove Hollywood doesn't learn its lesson, the same outfit is planning a spin-off featuring Deadpool, who can't talk and doesn't have a head.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 36%
• Box Office Gross: $179 million
20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)
Forever to be known as "the worse of two mall-cop-themed comedies to be released in the spring of 2009" -- and that's no small feat considering how awful Seth Rogen's Observe and Report(aka the competition) turned out. It's tough to stomach the constant potshots at the fat, the stupid and the middle class, but it's tougher to stomach this simple reality: Kevin James has found his niche. And considering the $180 million box office take, he ain't going away.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 34%
• Box Office Gross: $146 million
19. Planet of the Apes (2001)
We'll give Tim Burton this much: he found the modern equivalent of Charlton Heston in Mark Wahlberg, all snarl and over-emoting. Alas, Burton's remake of the 1968 classic was bogged down in overwrought dialogue and laughable inside jokes, whereas the superior original shined with sparse dialogue and a straight face. To top it off, the climax made no sense at all. Quoth Tim Roth, who co-starred: "I have seen it twice and I don't understand anything."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 45%
• Box Office Gross: $180 million
18. The Mummy Returns (2001)
Classic case of the sequel that returns all of its stars but none of the charm. Too much backstory -- here revolving around the Scorpion King, played by the Rock in his first major role -- and too many special-effects pieces leave little time for the Indiana Jones-y banter that was so endearing in The Mummy. We might have included the spin-off Scorpion King on this list, but it didn't make enough money ... burn.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 47%
• Box Office Gross: $202 million
17. Click (2006)
Comparisons to It's a Wonderful Life and Back to the Future are tempting, but that would be giving Click -- and Sandler, who's at it again, acting like a 15-year-old manchild -- too much credit. There's a running joke in the new Judd Apatow film Funny People that pokes fun at some of Sandler's more implausible, family-friendly sell-out comedies, and this one had to have provided great inspiration.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 31%
• Box Office Gross: $137 million
16. Patch Adams (1998)
Ever tried to put your finger on exactly what bothered you about Robin Williams? Patch Adams has all the answers. Williams puts on an exhibition in the gonzo manic expression that we're so used to from him, but here he doesn't have crass impersonations or filthy wisecracks to hold him up. Of course, a by-the-books script, about a real-life "laughter is the best medicine" believer doesn't help. Even the true Patch Adams saw this one for what it is: "a loathsome film."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 24%
• Box Office Gross: $135 million
15. The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Scientific proof that a page-turner does not a Hollywood thriller make. Anyone who'd read Dan Brown's book had to figure a movie version would miss out on some of the finer points, especially the informative historic passages. Sure enough, Ron Howard produced a simplified version of Brown's rich thriller with twists and turns that often lacked explanation. Of course, you'd have to get past Tom Hanks' distracting mullet to even notice any of that.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 24%
• Box Office Gross: $217 million
14. Ghost Rider (2007)
There was a time when Nicolas Cage fixated on playing Superman. Having failed that, presumably, he opted for the next available unfilmed hero -- which happened to fall way down the spandex totem pole. Wayyy down. Besides obscurity, other contributing factors in Ghost Rider's netting only $5 million on its bloated $110 million budget include the fact that Cage was permitted to pen some of his own -- incredibly hellacious -- dialogue.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 27%
• Box Office Gross: $115 million
13. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Roland Emmerich's got a thing for destroying landmarks, so he was going to find a way to take out the Hollywood sign with a tornado and bury the Statue of Liberty in snow in the same movie eventually -- rules of nature be damned. The resulting, completely implausible movie, which cheaply played off all of our global-warming concerns, is "to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery," to quote one unamused Duke University paleoclimatologist.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 45%
• Box Office Gross: $186 million
12. Daredevil (2003)
If you could pinpoint America's Ben Affleck Over-saturation Moment, it's somewhere around the time of this movie. The same could be said about superhero pictures, as well. At the end of the day, few people knew enough about the C-list Marvel superhero, whose blindness Affleck played out awkwardly, to care. Yet that didn't stop the studio from greenlighting an even more mind-numbing spin-off, Elektra.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 44%
• Box Office Gross: $102 million
11. Scooby-Doo (2002)
Major points for discovering Matthew Lillard's lone role in this universe, as the comic Dane's knuckleheaded sidekick. Other than that, there's little to see here. In catering to a younger audience screenwriters blew pretty much every opportunity to riff on our Scooby speculations, like Velma's sexual orientation, Fred and Daphne's love life, and most obviously, Scooby and Shaggy's fixation with a certain herb. Instead we got fart jokes. Lots of fart jokes.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 28%
• Box Office Gross: $153 million
10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Face it people, we've created a monster. Following a strong positive reaction to his 2007 live-action franchise launcher, director Michael Bay went buck wild on the follow-up, piling on more explosions, more uncomfortable stereotyping, more leg-humping and more fights. (Can you even tell the robots apart when they tussle? We can't.) As if plot ever mattered, part 2's storyline somehow makes even less sense than the first movie's.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 20%
• Box Office Gross: $395 million
9. Fantastic Four (2005)
Technically this was the second crack at a Fantastic Four franchise, and this take was intended to be something like X-Men for families; that much was made clear when director Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) was hired. But it's hard to imagine that parents took anything away from this one, which largely ignores Dr. Doom, one of the coolest Marvel villains ever, in lieu of more internal conflicts. Flame on? Hardly. More like flame out.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 26%
• Box Office Gross: $154 million
8. Godzilla (1998)
That this, the 29th Godzilla movie, came out almost exactly a year after The Lost World: Jurassic Park, with its own dinosaurs-run-amok-on-mainland plotline, can only account for so much of our disappointment. Roland Emmerich's remake of the Japanese classic fixated too much on inside jokes (a mayor named Ebert) and on cramming in every single New York landmark. But ultimately, yes, the baby Godzilla attack, which ripped off JP's raptors, is our main beef.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 26%
• Box Office Gross: $136 million
7. Wild Wild West (1999)
An exercise in the power of word of mouth: This stinker raked in $50 million in week one, but bad buzz (Entertainment Weekly called it "a noisy, joyless, bizarrely static fiasco") turned off audiences and the pic barely doubled its total in the next three months. Star Will Smith later apologized for the film, which remade a 1960s Robert Conrad TV series, saying, "I made a mistake on Wild Wild West ... When there's a Fresh Prince movie, I hope I'm so far buried under something."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 21%
• Box Office Gross: $113 million
6. Van Helsing (2004)
Picture James Bond as a 19th-century monster slayer who encounters every single one of his foes -- Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman, Dracula and his brides -- in the span of one movie, and there you have Van Helsing, a ramped-up special-effects disaster of the "more! more! more!" energy drink generation. Sorry to say director Stephen Sommers blows his wad with action sequence after action sequence. Scary bad stuff.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 22%
• Box Office Gross: $120 million
5. The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
One thing you can say about those Wachowski brothers, they sure know how to time their movies. After giving us four years to digest how bloody brilliant part 1 was, they crammed two sequels together, not giving us a moment to ponder how bad part 2 (Reloaded) actually was. This one, part 3, got saddled with delivering a disappointing ending that lacked ambiguity or any of the philosophical musings of its predecessors.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 37%
• Box Office Gross: $139 million
4. Batman & Robin (1997)
Otherwise known as the Filmmaker's Guide to Ruining a Franchise. Key points: Tack on a sidekick, and then a sidekick to the sidekick (preferably female); heap on villains without regard for infamy, or lack thereof; casting -- try a dartboard; ramp up the camp and, especially, the homoerotic innuendo; and above all: codpieces and rubber, pointy nipples for your superhero.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 12%
• Box Office Gross: $107 million
3. Pearl Harbor (2001)
Michael Bay's first crack at a mega-blockbuster failed on too many levels to count -- but we'll try. Bay's all-star cast failed to pack any punch, the side-story love triangle lacked emotion, the dialogue fell painfully flat and none of the crucial action sequences (which many war veterans complained to be grossly inaccurate) could match the power of, say, the Normandy invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan, which had arrived three years earlier.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 25%
• Box Office Gross: $198 million
2. The Cat in the Hat (2003)
Who was this one was supposed to appeal to? Kids were scared of Mike Myers' freaky cat makeup and probably didn't get that he was just doing Austin Powers -- or, more accurately, Jim Carrey -- in a fur suit. Parents, meanwhile, were turned off by all of the fart and belch jokes, and they recoiled at the mere presence of go-to moppets Spencer Breslin (Two and a Half Men) and Dakota Fanning (every cute movie ever).
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 12%
• Box Office Gross: $101 million
1. Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace (1999)
Be honest: George Lucas could have delivered a three-hour documentary on the mating habits of dung beetles and you still would have attended the first new Star Wars movie since 1983. (In reality, could The Phantom Menace have been much worse?) Among Lucas' more egregious offenses were the jive-talking Jar-Jar Binks, a goofier Yoda and child actor Jake Lloyd (as baby Vader) who's been pleasantly AWOL ever since.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 63%
• Box Office Gross: $431 million
http://www.moviefone.com/insidemovies/2009/08/17/worst-blockbusters-5-1
25. Armageddon (1998)
Nothing in this appropriately dubbed disaster pic makes anything close to scientific sense, right down to the plan to divert a Texas-sized asteroid by digging a hole in it and blowing it up. And when we finally got over our wasted 10 bucks, there was Steven Tyler moaning the movie's theme, 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing,' on the radio for the next six months. Roger Ebert put it best: "No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 40%
• Box Office Gross: $201 million
24. Bad Boys II (2003)
The first chapter in this urbanized buddy cop story was far from perfect, watchable mostly due to the undeniable charm and chemistry of its fast-talking leads, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But it's a masterpiece compared to the follow-up, which came a highly unnecessary eight years later. Overblown, under-funny and Michael Bay-ed beyond belief (one scene involving a car chase that mows down half of a third-world village is particularly repulsive), it's 'Bad' alright. And not meaning good.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 23%
• Box Office Gross: $138 million
23. Wild Hogs (2007)
You can easily picture the get-together, perhaps at a BBQ, where Tim Allen convinced John Travolta, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence (surely the easiest sell) to come over to the dark side of "make-a-quick-buck" filmmaking. Pile on top of that foundation a midlife-crisis theme, motorcycles, lots of leather and some tasteless homophobia jokes and there you have all the makings of a ... "make-a-quick-buck" flick.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 14%
• Box Office Gross: $168 million
22. Spider Man 3 (2007)
... But part 3 could have been sooo good! The lead actors were back, as was director Sam Raimi, with two of the coolest Spidey villains and a $258 million budget to blow through. Easy peasy, right? Raimi messed that all up with questionable casting -- spindly Topher Grace as Venom -- and by heaping on a third antagonist (an overacting James Franco) plus equal amounts of lovey dovey drama, over-the-top humor and, most grievously, an evil Peter Parker cool-catting down the street (this is how a splatter-horror guru depicts "dark"?).
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 62%
• Box Office Gross: $336 million
21. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
Clearly somebody at 20th Century Fox doesn't get the allure of Wolverine. He's mysterious; a loner. And that's the way we like it. An origins story about the ornery cigar chomper was the last thing any self-respecting X-Men fan ever asked for. But there it was ... And there it went, disappearing from screens while barely recouping its expenses. Just to prove Hollywood doesn't learn its lesson, the same outfit is planning a spin-off featuring Deadpool, who can't talk and doesn't have a head.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 36%
• Box Office Gross: $179 million
20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)
Forever to be known as "the worse of two mall-cop-themed comedies to be released in the spring of 2009" -- and that's no small feat considering how awful Seth Rogen's Observe and Report(aka the competition) turned out. It's tough to stomach the constant potshots at the fat, the stupid and the middle class, but it's tougher to stomach this simple reality: Kevin James has found his niche. And considering the $180 million box office take, he ain't going away.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 34%
• Box Office Gross: $146 million
19. Planet of the Apes (2001)
We'll give Tim Burton this much: he found the modern equivalent of Charlton Heston in Mark Wahlberg, all snarl and over-emoting. Alas, Burton's remake of the 1968 classic was bogged down in overwrought dialogue and laughable inside jokes, whereas the superior original shined with sparse dialogue and a straight face. To top it off, the climax made no sense at all. Quoth Tim Roth, who co-starred: "I have seen it twice and I don't understand anything."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 45%
• Box Office Gross: $180 million
18. The Mummy Returns (2001)
Classic case of the sequel that returns all of its stars but none of the charm. Too much backstory -- here revolving around the Scorpion King, played by the Rock in his first major role -- and too many special-effects pieces leave little time for the Indiana Jones-y banter that was so endearing in The Mummy. We might have included the spin-off Scorpion King on this list, but it didn't make enough money ... burn.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 47%
• Box Office Gross: $202 million
17. Click (2006)
Comparisons to It's a Wonderful Life and Back to the Future are tempting, but that would be giving Click -- and Sandler, who's at it again, acting like a 15-year-old manchild -- too much credit. There's a running joke in the new Judd Apatow film Funny People that pokes fun at some of Sandler's more implausible, family-friendly sell-out comedies, and this one had to have provided great inspiration.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 31%
• Box Office Gross: $137 million
16. Patch Adams (1998)
Ever tried to put your finger on exactly what bothered you about Robin Williams? Patch Adams has all the answers. Williams puts on an exhibition in the gonzo manic expression that we're so used to from him, but here he doesn't have crass impersonations or filthy wisecracks to hold him up. Of course, a by-the-books script, about a real-life "laughter is the best medicine" believer doesn't help. Even the true Patch Adams saw this one for what it is: "a loathsome film."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 24%
• Box Office Gross: $135 million
15. The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Scientific proof that a page-turner does not a Hollywood thriller make. Anyone who'd read Dan Brown's book had to figure a movie version would miss out on some of the finer points, especially the informative historic passages. Sure enough, Ron Howard produced a simplified version of Brown's rich thriller with twists and turns that often lacked explanation. Of course, you'd have to get past Tom Hanks' distracting mullet to even notice any of that.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 24%
• Box Office Gross: $217 million
14. Ghost Rider (2007)
There was a time when Nicolas Cage fixated on playing Superman. Having failed that, presumably, he opted for the next available unfilmed hero -- which happened to fall way down the spandex totem pole. Wayyy down. Besides obscurity, other contributing factors in Ghost Rider's netting only $5 million on its bloated $110 million budget include the fact that Cage was permitted to pen some of his own -- incredibly hellacious -- dialogue.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 27%
• Box Office Gross: $115 million
13. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Roland Emmerich's got a thing for destroying landmarks, so he was going to find a way to take out the Hollywood sign with a tornado and bury the Statue of Liberty in snow in the same movie eventually -- rules of nature be damned. The resulting, completely implausible movie, which cheaply played off all of our global-warming concerns, is "to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery," to quote one unamused Duke University paleoclimatologist.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 45%
• Box Office Gross: $186 million
12. Daredevil (2003)
If you could pinpoint America's Ben Affleck Over-saturation Moment, it's somewhere around the time of this movie. The same could be said about superhero pictures, as well. At the end of the day, few people knew enough about the C-list Marvel superhero, whose blindness Affleck played out awkwardly, to care. Yet that didn't stop the studio from greenlighting an even more mind-numbing spin-off, Elektra.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 44%
• Box Office Gross: $102 million
11. Scooby-Doo (2002)
Major points for discovering Matthew Lillard's lone role in this universe, as the comic Dane's knuckleheaded sidekick. Other than that, there's little to see here. In catering to a younger audience screenwriters blew pretty much every opportunity to riff on our Scooby speculations, like Velma's sexual orientation, Fred and Daphne's love life, and most obviously, Scooby and Shaggy's fixation with a certain herb. Instead we got fart jokes. Lots of fart jokes.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 28%
• Box Office Gross: $153 million
10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Face it people, we've created a monster. Following a strong positive reaction to his 2007 live-action franchise launcher, director Michael Bay went buck wild on the follow-up, piling on more explosions, more uncomfortable stereotyping, more leg-humping and more fights. (Can you even tell the robots apart when they tussle? We can't.) As if plot ever mattered, part 2's storyline somehow makes even less sense than the first movie's.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 20%
• Box Office Gross: $395 million
9. Fantastic Four (2005)
Technically this was the second crack at a Fantastic Four franchise, and this take was intended to be something like X-Men for families; that much was made clear when director Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) was hired. But it's hard to imagine that parents took anything away from this one, which largely ignores Dr. Doom, one of the coolest Marvel villains ever, in lieu of more internal conflicts. Flame on? Hardly. More like flame out.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 26%
• Box Office Gross: $154 million
8. Godzilla (1998)
That this, the 29th Godzilla movie, came out almost exactly a year after The Lost World: Jurassic Park, with its own dinosaurs-run-amok-on-mainland plotline, can only account for so much of our disappointment. Roland Emmerich's remake of the Japanese classic fixated too much on inside jokes (a mayor named Ebert) and on cramming in every single New York landmark. But ultimately, yes, the baby Godzilla attack, which ripped off JP's raptors, is our main beef.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 26%
• Box Office Gross: $136 million
7. Wild Wild West (1999)
An exercise in the power of word of mouth: This stinker raked in $50 million in week one, but bad buzz (Entertainment Weekly called it "a noisy, joyless, bizarrely static fiasco") turned off audiences and the pic barely doubled its total in the next three months. Star Will Smith later apologized for the film, which remade a 1960s Robert Conrad TV series, saying, "I made a mistake on Wild Wild West ... When there's a Fresh Prince movie, I hope I'm so far buried under something."
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 21%
• Box Office Gross: $113 million
6. Van Helsing (2004)
Picture James Bond as a 19th-century monster slayer who encounters every single one of his foes -- Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman, Dracula and his brides -- in the span of one movie, and there you have Van Helsing, a ramped-up special-effects disaster of the "more! more! more!" energy drink generation. Sorry to say director Stephen Sommers blows his wad with action sequence after action sequence. Scary bad stuff.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 22%
• Box Office Gross: $120 million
5. The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
One thing you can say about those Wachowski brothers, they sure know how to time their movies. After giving us four years to digest how bloody brilliant part 1 was, they crammed two sequels together, not giving us a moment to ponder how bad part 2 (Reloaded) actually was. This one, part 3, got saddled with delivering a disappointing ending that lacked ambiguity or any of the philosophical musings of its predecessors.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 37%
• Box Office Gross: $139 million
4. Batman & Robin (1997)
Otherwise known as the Filmmaker's Guide to Ruining a Franchise. Key points: Tack on a sidekick, and then a sidekick to the sidekick (preferably female); heap on villains without regard for infamy, or lack thereof; casting -- try a dartboard; ramp up the camp and, especially, the homoerotic innuendo; and above all: codpieces and rubber, pointy nipples for your superhero.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 12%
• Box Office Gross: $107 million
3. Pearl Harbor (2001)
Michael Bay's first crack at a mega-blockbuster failed on too many levels to count -- but we'll try. Bay's all-star cast failed to pack any punch, the side-story love triangle lacked emotion, the dialogue fell painfully flat and none of the crucial action sequences (which many war veterans complained to be grossly inaccurate) could match the power of, say, the Normandy invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan, which had arrived three years earlier.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 25%
• Box Office Gross: $198 million
2. The Cat in the Hat (2003)
Who was this one was supposed to appeal to? Kids were scared of Mike Myers' freaky cat makeup and probably didn't get that he was just doing Austin Powers -- or, more accurately, Jim Carrey -- in a fur suit. Parents, meanwhile, were turned off by all of the fart and belch jokes, and they recoiled at the mere presence of go-to moppets Spencer Breslin (Two and a Half Men) and Dakota Fanning (every cute movie ever).
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 12%
• Box Office Gross: $101 million
1. Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace (1999)
Be honest: George Lucas could have delivered a three-hour documentary on the mating habits of dung beetles and you still would have attended the first new Star Wars movie since 1983. (In reality, could The Phantom Menace have been much worse?) Among Lucas' more egregious offenses were the jive-talking Jar-Jar Binks, a goofier Yoda and child actor Jake Lloyd (as baby Vader) who's been pleasantly AWOL ever since.
• Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 63%
• Box Office Gross: $431 million
http://www.moviefone.com/insidemovies/2009/08/17/worst-blockbusters-5-1