JamesG
11-27-2014, 09:44 PM
Turkeys! Movies That Flamed Out in Spectacular Ways
by EW Staff
Nov 26, 2014
Cleopatra (1963)
Elizabeth Taylor's $44 million 1963 extravaganza had unprecedented advance publicity. Twentieth Century Fox made Taylor the first star ever to be paid a million bucks for a movie. When her first set of costars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd quit, they were replaced with Rex Harrison (Julius Caesar) and, fatefully, Richard Burton (Mark Antony).
Dick and Liz quickly began a tempestuous relationship for the ages. Writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz lost his battle with the studio to release the movie in two 2.5-hour parts. And Cleopatra opened as a four-hour-and-three-minute feature (the longest ever) on June 12, 1963.
Fox ballyhooed the movie in its advertising with unintentional irony as "the motion picture the world has been waiting for."
Although the ill-fated spectacle eventually earned $26 million in film rentals (the amount theater operators paid the studio), Cleopatra's costs made it almost certainly the biggest money-loser of all time.
Most critics gave the epic mixed-to-negative reviews. Fox was so incensed by the stinging criticism Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune leveled at the movie that it banned her from its press screenings.
Taylor's star was hardly dimmed, but she was clearly glad her Queen-of-the-Nile days were over. Taylor later said that after attending the film's London premiere, "I raced back to the Dorchester and just made it to the downstairs lavatory and vomited."
Star! (1968)
Having collaborated on that super-saccharine 1965 megahit, The Sound of Music, director-producer Robert Wise and songstress Julie Andrews seemed likely to make cash registers come alive again.
They chose this musical biography of the acerbic English-born stage star Gertrude Lawrence. The ad campaign, as exclamatory as the movie's title, helped raise expectations: "A totally wonderful musical entertainment! The love affair of the century between a woman and the world!"
Despite tunes by Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Kurt Weill, the three-and-a-quarter-hour, $14 million movie rang a sour note. The New Times' Renata Adler wrote that Lawrence was "portrayed as a kind of monster."
Twentieth Century Fox quickly pulled the movie from release for emergency surgery, even changing its name to the overly optimistic 'Those Were the Happy Times'. Still, Star! lost an estimated $10 million.
A dumbfounded Andrews suggested that "the public wasn't very happy with seeing me in drunken scenes." The silver lining? The trauma surrounding Star! and Andrews' 1970 companion flop Darling Lili provided much of the material for Blake Edwards' bitter and knowing 1981 Hollywood comedy, S.O.B.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Movie (1978)
Inspired by the Beatles' 1967 head-trip album, Sgt. Pepper had everything going for it: pop stars then riding high (the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton), genuine rockers (Aerosmith; Earth, Wind and Fire; and Billy Preston), familiar show-biz faces (George Burns and Steve Martin), and a leading rock promoter, Robert Stigwood, as producer.
This $12 million bomb had two problems no script and rotten renditions of 29 Beatles songs (the Beatles weren't in the movie).
Rolling Stone called the soundtrack the "worst album of the decade." The record sold nearly three million copies, but eight million were shipped to stores.
Ironically, even though the Bee Gees were bigger stars than Frampton by the time the movie was released, Frampton's contract guaranteed him "sole star billing," so his name came first in the ads.
Heaven's Gate (1980)
This dusty re-creation of the 19th-century Johnson County, Wyo., range wars, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and Isabelle Huppert, is the quintessence of turkeyhood to many filmgoers.
But when a new group of executives at United Artists signed director Michael Cimino for this picture, Cimino was finishing up The Deer Hunter, which was later named the Best Picture of 1978. It looked like a matchup made in heaven.
Heaven's Gate proved to be more like a movie made in hell. Few films actually bring down a studio. This one did.
After Heaven's Gate ran up costs of $36 million and then opened to empty theaters and critical howls, UA's parent company fired the executives responsible and sold the entire studio to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
What went wrong? An unsupervised Cimino had obsessively filmed away, bursting Heaven's Gate's original $7.8 million budget. Yet he somehow forgot to lavish similar attention on character and plot.
Cimino never fully recovered from the fiasco and rarely discussed the movie publicly.
Howard the Duck (1986)
The concept for this 1986 movie sounded like a can't-miss proposition. Fantasy-meister George Lucas of Star Wars fame and his co-writers on American Graffiti, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, would bring to life the plucky, cigar-chomping '70s cult hero of Marvel comics.
Universal's Howard the Duck was sure to be an odd bird, but Superman had already shown that comic-book movies could fly.
This $34.5 million bird crashed on takeoff. The headline writers weighed in with such gems as "Howard Lays an Egg," and the curdled fantasy ranked 57th among the year's major-studio releases.
Lucas magically escaped without any egg on his face. So did actress Lea Thompson, who went on to make two Back to the Future flicks. But studio chairman Frank Price quit and was replaced by Lucas' lawyer, Thomas Pollock, who had engineered the Howard deal.
Ishtar (1987)
As Warren Beatty's first film since Reds and Dustin Hoffman's follow-up to Tootsie, Ishtar could hardly manage to sneak up on its audiences.
Once word got out that each actor was being paid $5.5 million for this updated road movie about second-rate singer-songwriters caught up in international intrigue in a mythical Middle Eastern country, critics and moviegoers were fired with million-dollar expectations. Many were curious to see whether the chemistry between Beatty and Hoffman would work.
Writer-director Elaine May, as notorious a perfectionist as her stars, reportedly spent $50 million and 17 weeks shooting in Morocco and New York making Ishtar the most expensive comedy ever.
When audiences and critics finally saw the results, they could not help marveling at the magnitude of its banality. ''A truly dreadful film," shuddered Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Shell-shocked, Hoffman described himself as "in pain, walking the streets" in the wake of the movie's opening.
By year's end, Ishtar had grossed only about $15 million. Though Hoffman and Beatty bounced back, May has never directed another movie.
Cutthroat Island (1995)
Eight years before Johnny Depp made movie theaters safe for pirates again, this mishmash-up of Errol Flynn derring-do and action-movie derring-don't was one of the great bombs of the '90s.
Made for close to $100 million at a time when that number still meant something, it grossed a mere $10 million at a time when that number already meant nothing.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
Listen, you crap-lousy two-bit man-animals: This dystopian sci-fi epic, based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, isn't just bad.
It's breathtakingly awful, from its nonsense dialogue ("I'm going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of Kerbango!") to its derivative plot, from its schlocky production values to John Travolta's jaw-droppingly ridiculous performance.
(Former EW film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote that Travolta "sounds like a fifth grader impersonating Dr. Frankenstein.")
Audiences agreed; the movie earned just $21 million, though it cost much more than that, landing it among the most expensive flops in Hollywood history.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
As one of the most popular video game series of all time, hopes were beyond sky-high for the first Final Fantasy film after all, the film was being developed by Squaresoft and directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the people who made Final Fantasy games!
As such, there was good reason to believe the franchise would be handled well. Alas, the film only earned $85 million back on a $137 million budget, with mixed critical reception to boot.
The technical mastery on display was groundbreaking and widely praised for its time, but the film also became a poster child for how weird things get in the Uncanny Valley.
The Adventure of Pluto Nash (2002)
Its one thing to be a critically panned film, but it's a whole other level of turkey when a film fails to recoup more than 90 percent of its budget.
After a strong string of comedy successes in the late '90s with 1996's The Nutty Professor and 1998's Dr. Dolittle, Eddie Murphy added a little speed bump to that success when he starred in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
The sci-fi comedy followed Murphy's titular character, a reformed smuggler in the year 2087, who is hunted down by mobsters who want to turn his successful lunar nightclub into a casino. That logline, however, is only a sliver of the flop pie that is Pluto Nash.
The film originated in the '80s (and should have stayed there), undergoing several revisions before finally being produced. Even then, the film sat on the shelf for two years before hitting theaters.
This long gestation period was a pretty sure sign that it just plain sucked, including but not limited to its nonsensical plot (at one point, Nash discovers he was cloned from his own removed appendix) and some seriously shoddy special effects that could not possibly have warranted the Marvel-worthy budget.
Bottom line: Pluto, despite its $100 million price tag, only earned a worldwide gross of $7.1 million, which made it one of the most costly box office blunders of all time.
Gigli (2003)
You want a turkey? Ben Affleck (pre-Benaissance) and Jennifer Lopez will give you a turkey complete with a head-scratching reference to the poor bird itself.
(Lopez's character, when she decides she wants to get busy with Affleck: ''It's turkey time. Gobble gobble.'' She has, until this point, described herself as a lesbian.)
This utterly laugh-free ''romantic 'comedy'' was so dire that it won seven Razzies, garnered a 6 percent ''fresh'' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and, oh yeah, earned just $6 million at the box office... against a budget of $54 million.
Gobble gobble, indeed.
Sahara (2005)
Take a seat, kids. This one's is truly epic.
Before the Oscars and Emmy nominations of the McConaissance, Matthew McConaughey had a few projects that, by his own admission, weren't so rewarding.
Enter Sahara, McConaughey's Ishtar. The blockbuster action flick seemingly did okay at the box office and wasn't entirely panned that is, until you delve into the nitty gritty concerning the film's budget and immense legal issues with source novel writer Clive Cussler.
The film's genesis was simple enough: In an attempt to replicate the franchise success of Indiana Jones, Cussler optioned the 11th novel in his Dirk Pitt series for $20 million with Philip Anschutz's Crusader Entertainment in 2001.
After four screenwriters tried and failed to successfully adapt the film, director Breck Eisner along with McConaughey and costar Penelope Cruz entered the picture. It should have been the first film of many for the Dirk Pitt action-adventure character.
It wasn't.
Cussler felt pushed out of the screenplay process and sued Anschutz and Crusader Entertainment for $100 million, saying that the $20 million deal should have guaranteed him complete creative control over the script.
A years-long court battle ensued, surfacing a laundry list of slanders and claims, notably accusations about McConaughey's sexual preferences, racism, and anti-Semitism, as well as a producer's case of hives that were caused by the stress of making of the movie.
Ultimately, Crusader countersued and the jury ruled in its favor, forcing Cussler to pay the production company $5 million in damages. However, the California appeals court overturned that payout, and Cussler filed a new lawsuit in 2010, in order to recover the $8.5 million he was owed on a contract with Crusader; he was denied.
Crusader, under the new name Bristol Bay Productions, filed a new lawsuit, suing Cussler's literary agent, Peter Lampack, and his publishers at Simon & Schuster and Penguin for misrepresenting his readership, which they say partly caused the film company's box office losses.
That lawsuit was also dismissed. Did you catch all that?
The film did so-so at the box office, but its $119 million global cume came nowhere close to recouping the immense $241 million budget.
Once financial documents became public domain due to the aforementioned lawsuit, the film's budget overruns became the subject of an L.A. Times article that dissected the waste-heavy cycle of a Hollywood blockbuster production, including the reported use of bribes in order to maintain efficiency in the production of the film in Morocco and the million-dollar action sequences that never even made it into the film.
Sahara certainly may not have seemed risky at the outset, but the final product was no reward.
Zyzzyx Road (2006)
Katherine Heigl pre-Knocked Up, Tom Sizemore post-sex tape, an unpronounceable unspellable title: Zyzzyx Road didn't have much to recommend it.
But the movie has earned its place in the history books nonetheless.
With a total domestic gross of $30 (yes, $30), it's considered the lowest-grossing movie in history. The truth is less funny, but just as sad: The filmmakers were obligated to give the film a "domestic release," so they sent a print to a single theater in Dallas Texas.
Oh, and $10 of that total was refunded to a crew member who'd paid to see the film with a friend.
Mars Needs Moms (2011)
Robert Zemeckis' decade-long attempt to convince the viewing public to enjoy motion-capture animated films ended with a calamitous whimper, when ImageMovers Digital (the animation studio founded by Zemeckis) released this animated space odyssey about mom-abducting Martians.
Legend has it that the film's failure had a toxic halo effect, convincing Disney to delete the name of the red planet from their long-in-the-works adaptation of John Carter of Mars.
(As we now know, that title change didn't help.)
The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (2012)
Maybe it was the writing. Maybe it was the directing. Maybe it was the acting. Maybe it was the weirdly proportioned, kind-of-terrifying, dead-eyed, felt-covered, toddler-shaped costumes the characters wore.
For whatever reason, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure is the current record holder for the worst wide opening ever. Even by the extremely weird standards we have for preschool-appropriate entertainment, Oogieloves was a bridge too far.
John Carter (2012)
The director of Wall-E. Tim Riggins. Edgar Rice Burroughs. What could go wrong with John Carter? Apparently a lot.
Disney's bid for an epic space franchise before the company came into Star Wars disappointed on nearly every critical and financial level. Despite some intriguing aspects, the generic advertising campaign and massive budget essentially killed the film before it opened; it had to make an estimated $600 million at the box office just to break even.
The would-be franchise cornerstone, alas, was not up to snuff and quickly became a venture from which Disney would rather just move on.
The Lone Ranger (2013)
Audiences did not flock to theaters to see Johnny Depp's questionable portrayal of Tonto in Gore Verbinski's messy throwback Western. The movie had a rocky ride to the screen, with Disney stepping on the brakes due to budget concerns.
Only, when the movie finally did get made, the budget was still enormous, ranging between $215 and $250 million. That eventually cost Disney up to $190 million when the movie bombed at the box office, bringing in only $29.2 million in its opening weekend.
That's not to mention that the movie was just flat-out bad an overlong cacophony of Depp kitsch and brutal violence.
47 Ronin (2013)
Based on a classic historical epic that it more or less ignores entirely, 47 Ronin is a weird fantasy film set in Japan and starring Keanu Reeves.
Early in its development, the film made headlines for less than ideal reasons its director, Carl Rinsch, had never made a feature film before and Universal gave him a $170 million budget.
The film would ultimately gross a little more than $38 million of that budget back, making it the second biggest box office bomb ever.
http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20876472,00.html
by EW Staff
Nov 26, 2014
Cleopatra (1963)
Elizabeth Taylor's $44 million 1963 extravaganza had unprecedented advance publicity. Twentieth Century Fox made Taylor the first star ever to be paid a million bucks for a movie. When her first set of costars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd quit, they were replaced with Rex Harrison (Julius Caesar) and, fatefully, Richard Burton (Mark Antony).
Dick and Liz quickly began a tempestuous relationship for the ages. Writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz lost his battle with the studio to release the movie in two 2.5-hour parts. And Cleopatra opened as a four-hour-and-three-minute feature (the longest ever) on June 12, 1963.
Fox ballyhooed the movie in its advertising with unintentional irony as "the motion picture the world has been waiting for."
Although the ill-fated spectacle eventually earned $26 million in film rentals (the amount theater operators paid the studio), Cleopatra's costs made it almost certainly the biggest money-loser of all time.
Most critics gave the epic mixed-to-negative reviews. Fox was so incensed by the stinging criticism Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune leveled at the movie that it banned her from its press screenings.
Taylor's star was hardly dimmed, but she was clearly glad her Queen-of-the-Nile days were over. Taylor later said that after attending the film's London premiere, "I raced back to the Dorchester and just made it to the downstairs lavatory and vomited."
Star! (1968)
Having collaborated on that super-saccharine 1965 megahit, The Sound of Music, director-producer Robert Wise and songstress Julie Andrews seemed likely to make cash registers come alive again.
They chose this musical biography of the acerbic English-born stage star Gertrude Lawrence. The ad campaign, as exclamatory as the movie's title, helped raise expectations: "A totally wonderful musical entertainment! The love affair of the century between a woman and the world!"
Despite tunes by Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Kurt Weill, the three-and-a-quarter-hour, $14 million movie rang a sour note. The New Times' Renata Adler wrote that Lawrence was "portrayed as a kind of monster."
Twentieth Century Fox quickly pulled the movie from release for emergency surgery, even changing its name to the overly optimistic 'Those Were the Happy Times'. Still, Star! lost an estimated $10 million.
A dumbfounded Andrews suggested that "the public wasn't very happy with seeing me in drunken scenes." The silver lining? The trauma surrounding Star! and Andrews' 1970 companion flop Darling Lili provided much of the material for Blake Edwards' bitter and knowing 1981 Hollywood comedy, S.O.B.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Movie (1978)
Inspired by the Beatles' 1967 head-trip album, Sgt. Pepper had everything going for it: pop stars then riding high (the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton), genuine rockers (Aerosmith; Earth, Wind and Fire; and Billy Preston), familiar show-biz faces (George Burns and Steve Martin), and a leading rock promoter, Robert Stigwood, as producer.
This $12 million bomb had two problems no script and rotten renditions of 29 Beatles songs (the Beatles weren't in the movie).
Rolling Stone called the soundtrack the "worst album of the decade." The record sold nearly three million copies, but eight million were shipped to stores.
Ironically, even though the Bee Gees were bigger stars than Frampton by the time the movie was released, Frampton's contract guaranteed him "sole star billing," so his name came first in the ads.
Heaven's Gate (1980)
This dusty re-creation of the 19th-century Johnson County, Wyo., range wars, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and Isabelle Huppert, is the quintessence of turkeyhood to many filmgoers.
But when a new group of executives at United Artists signed director Michael Cimino for this picture, Cimino was finishing up The Deer Hunter, which was later named the Best Picture of 1978. It looked like a matchup made in heaven.
Heaven's Gate proved to be more like a movie made in hell. Few films actually bring down a studio. This one did.
After Heaven's Gate ran up costs of $36 million and then opened to empty theaters and critical howls, UA's parent company fired the executives responsible and sold the entire studio to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
What went wrong? An unsupervised Cimino had obsessively filmed away, bursting Heaven's Gate's original $7.8 million budget. Yet he somehow forgot to lavish similar attention on character and plot.
Cimino never fully recovered from the fiasco and rarely discussed the movie publicly.
Howard the Duck (1986)
The concept for this 1986 movie sounded like a can't-miss proposition. Fantasy-meister George Lucas of Star Wars fame and his co-writers on American Graffiti, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, would bring to life the plucky, cigar-chomping '70s cult hero of Marvel comics.
Universal's Howard the Duck was sure to be an odd bird, but Superman had already shown that comic-book movies could fly.
This $34.5 million bird crashed on takeoff. The headline writers weighed in with such gems as "Howard Lays an Egg," and the curdled fantasy ranked 57th among the year's major-studio releases.
Lucas magically escaped without any egg on his face. So did actress Lea Thompson, who went on to make two Back to the Future flicks. But studio chairman Frank Price quit and was replaced by Lucas' lawyer, Thomas Pollock, who had engineered the Howard deal.
Ishtar (1987)
As Warren Beatty's first film since Reds and Dustin Hoffman's follow-up to Tootsie, Ishtar could hardly manage to sneak up on its audiences.
Once word got out that each actor was being paid $5.5 million for this updated road movie about second-rate singer-songwriters caught up in international intrigue in a mythical Middle Eastern country, critics and moviegoers were fired with million-dollar expectations. Many were curious to see whether the chemistry between Beatty and Hoffman would work.
Writer-director Elaine May, as notorious a perfectionist as her stars, reportedly spent $50 million and 17 weeks shooting in Morocco and New York making Ishtar the most expensive comedy ever.
When audiences and critics finally saw the results, they could not help marveling at the magnitude of its banality. ''A truly dreadful film," shuddered Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Shell-shocked, Hoffman described himself as "in pain, walking the streets" in the wake of the movie's opening.
By year's end, Ishtar had grossed only about $15 million. Though Hoffman and Beatty bounced back, May has never directed another movie.
Cutthroat Island (1995)
Eight years before Johnny Depp made movie theaters safe for pirates again, this mishmash-up of Errol Flynn derring-do and action-movie derring-don't was one of the great bombs of the '90s.
Made for close to $100 million at a time when that number still meant something, it grossed a mere $10 million at a time when that number already meant nothing.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
Listen, you crap-lousy two-bit man-animals: This dystopian sci-fi epic, based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, isn't just bad.
It's breathtakingly awful, from its nonsense dialogue ("I'm going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of Kerbango!") to its derivative plot, from its schlocky production values to John Travolta's jaw-droppingly ridiculous performance.
(Former EW film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote that Travolta "sounds like a fifth grader impersonating Dr. Frankenstein.")
Audiences agreed; the movie earned just $21 million, though it cost much more than that, landing it among the most expensive flops in Hollywood history.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
As one of the most popular video game series of all time, hopes were beyond sky-high for the first Final Fantasy film after all, the film was being developed by Squaresoft and directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the people who made Final Fantasy games!
As such, there was good reason to believe the franchise would be handled well. Alas, the film only earned $85 million back on a $137 million budget, with mixed critical reception to boot.
The technical mastery on display was groundbreaking and widely praised for its time, but the film also became a poster child for how weird things get in the Uncanny Valley.
The Adventure of Pluto Nash (2002)
Its one thing to be a critically panned film, but it's a whole other level of turkey when a film fails to recoup more than 90 percent of its budget.
After a strong string of comedy successes in the late '90s with 1996's The Nutty Professor and 1998's Dr. Dolittle, Eddie Murphy added a little speed bump to that success when he starred in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
The sci-fi comedy followed Murphy's titular character, a reformed smuggler in the year 2087, who is hunted down by mobsters who want to turn his successful lunar nightclub into a casino. That logline, however, is only a sliver of the flop pie that is Pluto Nash.
The film originated in the '80s (and should have stayed there), undergoing several revisions before finally being produced. Even then, the film sat on the shelf for two years before hitting theaters.
This long gestation period was a pretty sure sign that it just plain sucked, including but not limited to its nonsensical plot (at one point, Nash discovers he was cloned from his own removed appendix) and some seriously shoddy special effects that could not possibly have warranted the Marvel-worthy budget.
Bottom line: Pluto, despite its $100 million price tag, only earned a worldwide gross of $7.1 million, which made it one of the most costly box office blunders of all time.
Gigli (2003)
You want a turkey? Ben Affleck (pre-Benaissance) and Jennifer Lopez will give you a turkey complete with a head-scratching reference to the poor bird itself.
(Lopez's character, when she decides she wants to get busy with Affleck: ''It's turkey time. Gobble gobble.'' She has, until this point, described herself as a lesbian.)
This utterly laugh-free ''romantic 'comedy'' was so dire that it won seven Razzies, garnered a 6 percent ''fresh'' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and, oh yeah, earned just $6 million at the box office... against a budget of $54 million.
Gobble gobble, indeed.
Sahara (2005)
Take a seat, kids. This one's is truly epic.
Before the Oscars and Emmy nominations of the McConaissance, Matthew McConaughey had a few projects that, by his own admission, weren't so rewarding.
Enter Sahara, McConaughey's Ishtar. The blockbuster action flick seemingly did okay at the box office and wasn't entirely panned that is, until you delve into the nitty gritty concerning the film's budget and immense legal issues with source novel writer Clive Cussler.
The film's genesis was simple enough: In an attempt to replicate the franchise success of Indiana Jones, Cussler optioned the 11th novel in his Dirk Pitt series for $20 million with Philip Anschutz's Crusader Entertainment in 2001.
After four screenwriters tried and failed to successfully adapt the film, director Breck Eisner along with McConaughey and costar Penelope Cruz entered the picture. It should have been the first film of many for the Dirk Pitt action-adventure character.
It wasn't.
Cussler felt pushed out of the screenplay process and sued Anschutz and Crusader Entertainment for $100 million, saying that the $20 million deal should have guaranteed him complete creative control over the script.
A years-long court battle ensued, surfacing a laundry list of slanders and claims, notably accusations about McConaughey's sexual preferences, racism, and anti-Semitism, as well as a producer's case of hives that were caused by the stress of making of the movie.
Ultimately, Crusader countersued and the jury ruled in its favor, forcing Cussler to pay the production company $5 million in damages. However, the California appeals court overturned that payout, and Cussler filed a new lawsuit in 2010, in order to recover the $8.5 million he was owed on a contract with Crusader; he was denied.
Crusader, under the new name Bristol Bay Productions, filed a new lawsuit, suing Cussler's literary agent, Peter Lampack, and his publishers at Simon & Schuster and Penguin for misrepresenting his readership, which they say partly caused the film company's box office losses.
That lawsuit was also dismissed. Did you catch all that?
The film did so-so at the box office, but its $119 million global cume came nowhere close to recouping the immense $241 million budget.
Once financial documents became public domain due to the aforementioned lawsuit, the film's budget overruns became the subject of an L.A. Times article that dissected the waste-heavy cycle of a Hollywood blockbuster production, including the reported use of bribes in order to maintain efficiency in the production of the film in Morocco and the million-dollar action sequences that never even made it into the film.
Sahara certainly may not have seemed risky at the outset, but the final product was no reward.
Zyzzyx Road (2006)
Katherine Heigl pre-Knocked Up, Tom Sizemore post-sex tape, an unpronounceable unspellable title: Zyzzyx Road didn't have much to recommend it.
But the movie has earned its place in the history books nonetheless.
With a total domestic gross of $30 (yes, $30), it's considered the lowest-grossing movie in history. The truth is less funny, but just as sad: The filmmakers were obligated to give the film a "domestic release," so they sent a print to a single theater in Dallas Texas.
Oh, and $10 of that total was refunded to a crew member who'd paid to see the film with a friend.
Mars Needs Moms (2011)
Robert Zemeckis' decade-long attempt to convince the viewing public to enjoy motion-capture animated films ended with a calamitous whimper, when ImageMovers Digital (the animation studio founded by Zemeckis) released this animated space odyssey about mom-abducting Martians.
Legend has it that the film's failure had a toxic halo effect, convincing Disney to delete the name of the red planet from their long-in-the-works adaptation of John Carter of Mars.
(As we now know, that title change didn't help.)
The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (2012)
Maybe it was the writing. Maybe it was the directing. Maybe it was the acting. Maybe it was the weirdly proportioned, kind-of-terrifying, dead-eyed, felt-covered, toddler-shaped costumes the characters wore.
For whatever reason, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure is the current record holder for the worst wide opening ever. Even by the extremely weird standards we have for preschool-appropriate entertainment, Oogieloves was a bridge too far.
John Carter (2012)
The director of Wall-E. Tim Riggins. Edgar Rice Burroughs. What could go wrong with John Carter? Apparently a lot.
Disney's bid for an epic space franchise before the company came into Star Wars disappointed on nearly every critical and financial level. Despite some intriguing aspects, the generic advertising campaign and massive budget essentially killed the film before it opened; it had to make an estimated $600 million at the box office just to break even.
The would-be franchise cornerstone, alas, was not up to snuff and quickly became a venture from which Disney would rather just move on.
The Lone Ranger (2013)
Audiences did not flock to theaters to see Johnny Depp's questionable portrayal of Tonto in Gore Verbinski's messy throwback Western. The movie had a rocky ride to the screen, with Disney stepping on the brakes due to budget concerns.
Only, when the movie finally did get made, the budget was still enormous, ranging between $215 and $250 million. That eventually cost Disney up to $190 million when the movie bombed at the box office, bringing in only $29.2 million in its opening weekend.
That's not to mention that the movie was just flat-out bad an overlong cacophony of Depp kitsch and brutal violence.
47 Ronin (2013)
Based on a classic historical epic that it more or less ignores entirely, 47 Ronin is a weird fantasy film set in Japan and starring Keanu Reeves.
Early in its development, the film made headlines for less than ideal reasons its director, Carl Rinsch, had never made a feature film before and Universal gave him a $170 million budget.
The film would ultimately gross a little more than $38 million of that budget back, making it the second biggest box office bomb ever.
http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20876472,00.html