The year is coming to an end and it’s been a year of hits and misses at the box office. Films such as Jurassic World dominated the box office, while others such as Blackhat fell well under box office expectations. This list will focus on the movies didn’t meet their budget total at the box office. Jupiter Ascending and Disney’s Tomorrowland are considered box office bombs also, but mainly due to not meeting the totals spent on production and marketing.
It’s important to remember that no movie is a sure thing at the box office, and that every year, studios make risky decisions involving billions of dollars. Sometimes, these risks make studio execs look like geniuses, but other risks get them fired.
Here are Screen Rant’s 10 Biggest Box Office Bombs of 2015.
Honorable MENTION: JUPITER ASCENDING
The Wachowskis have been on a losing streak lately.Jupiter Ascendingwas a descending moment in their filmmaking careers. Working with a $176 million budget, they only earned a total of $183.9 million at the worldwide box office. A minimal box office gain, but that doesn’t match the money that was put into marketing and distribution. Domestically earning $18.4 million on its opening weekend, the $32.5 million number one opening it had overseas aided the bad start.
The project had issues from the beginning. Originally slated to be released between July 18-24 of 2014, the release was pushed back to February 2015. On the bright side, the film’s stars, Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis, were nominated for the Kids and Teen Choice Awards.
Honorable MENTION: TOMORROWLAND
Disney’s theme park-inspired movie starring George Clooney and the promising Britt Robertson fell completely flat with the audiences. Tomorrowlandhad a $190 million dollar budget and $93.4 million of it was earned back domestically. The total worldwide earnings came out to $208.6 million, with a small gain of nearly $20 million box office profit.
The problem is that it cost Disney a reported $330 million to produce and market the movie. It’s projected to lose between anywhere from $120-140 million. It was a bold move to release it during the time where Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max:Fury Road were dominating at the box office. A memo to Disney, keep your theme park rides where they should be at: at the theme parks.
10. ROCK THE KASBAH
Have people lost touch with the comedy of Bill Murray, or have they grown sick of anything American Idol related? Well, Bill Murray managing an Afghan singer who manages to make it big on the Afghani version Idol didn’t entice many moviegoers. On October 23rd, the Friday of what might be one of the all-time worst box office bomb weekends, audiences were subjected to Rock the Kasbah, The Last Witch Hunter, Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension, Jem and the Holograms, and Steve Jobs. Ouch. A
ccording to Box Office Mojo, Rock the Kasbah had the fifth worst opening of all-time for a film screened in 2,000 theaters or more. Kasbah made a grand total of $3.2 million, which doesn’t even cover one-third of it’s $15 million dollar budget. Shia LaBeouf was reportedly part of the film originally, but dropped out. That might have been the best career move LaBeouf has ever made lately.
9. PAN
Critics panned this movie well before its disappointing release. Director Joe Wright was wrong about this adaptation of the Peter Pan story. The immense talents of Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara had no chance of saving this silly 3D fantasy adventure.
The $150 million budget paled in comparison to estimated cost of $250 million reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the movie only grossed a worldwide total of $124.8 million. Only $31.8 million of the gross came domestically. Warner Bros. is slated to lose anywhere between 130-150 million, if not more. It’s another instance in which the recycling of old ideas for a fresh new audience has made a new movie seem more stale than fresh.
8. OUR BRAND IS CRISIS
This Sandra Bullock blunder could have easily be renamed Our Brand Is Box Office Crisis. The film opened on October 30th, which was a harsh weekend that featured Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse and Burnt (another movie that almost made this list).
The $3.2 million opening weekend was the lowest opening of Bullock’s career and the box office total of $7.5 million was well below it’s $28 million budget. This is not the sort of result that the team of Bullock and Clooney (as a producer) were hoping for after working together in Gravity. There will probably be no Oscar nominations for Bullock this time around.
7. MORTDECAI
It’s amazing that someone could star in Black Mass and Mortdecaiin the same year, but Johnny Depp accomplished that task. Come awards time, he’s probably hoping that everyone will have forgotten that he attached himself to this miserably unfunny film.
Amazingly, this film had a $60 million dollar budget, and due to Depp’s international appeal, it made $39.6 million overseas to get the overall box office total to $47.3 million. The reviews were rightfully negative, and the film received a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, and 27 out of 100 on Metacritic.
As one could expect, plans for a sequel have been scrapped.
6. JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS
It’s unfortunate that this movie ever came out. It strays far away from the animated television series, which alienated fans and adults hoping for a nostalgic kick from the film. Just take a look at the trailer and that will tell you all you need to know.
Consider yourself lucky if you didn’t get to see this abomination in its short two-week theatrical run. The $1.4 million opening is the worst of 2015, and the 4th worst ever for a movie that was shown in over 2,000 theaters. The $2.8 million dollar box office was almost half of its $5 million budget.
5. THE GUNMAN
Audiences don’t believe Sean Penn as an action star of any kind. This French-American action thriller earned a measly $15.9 million worldwide box office by trying to convert Penn’s image in the same way that Taken converted Liam Neesom from a revered dramatic actor to a late-career action star.
The $5 million domestic earning was a bullet to the hopes of this film making anything close to the $40 million budget it had. To make matters worse, the film received a 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a bland film with a rotten box office. Penn should step aside and let Charlize handle all the action.
4. FANTASTIC FOUR
Fantastically underwhelming both critically and at the box office. They just can’t seem to get this franchise right over at 20th Century Fox. Given the success of recent Marvel movies and the ongoing success of the X-Men movies, Fox could be forgiven for thinking they could turn Marvel’s first family into a proper franchise in its own right.
Fantastic Four ended up making less than half its $120 million budget domestically, but ended up making nearly $112 million overseas. This Josh Trank incarnation of the superhero group tanked the high hopes Fox was banking on. A poor movie and a disappointing box office make this one of the worst box office bets of this year of this year.
3. CHILD 44
Tom Hardy had a big hit in 2015 with Mad Max: Fury Road, but what’s quickly forgotten is that he also starred in a bomb called Child 44. This British mystery thriller, based on a 2008 Tom Rob Smith novel of the same name, only made $1.2 million domestically.
The international audience did little to bail this film out by only adding $11.7 million for a grand worldwide total of $13 million. Lucky for Ridley Scott that he was also attached to the wildly successful The Martian, because Child 44 certainly didn’t make-up the losses to the $50 million dollar budget it had.
2. BLACKHAT
A failed marketing campaign that didn’t know how to promote the action, complex plot, or the love story of this film contributed to its poor $4.4 million dollar opening weekend. The powerhouse teaming between Michael Mann and Chris Hemsworth failed to live up to expectations. It’s worldwide box office run ended up pocketing only $19.5 million, far below its $70 million dollar budget.
To add further embarrassment, Universal decided not to release the movie theatrically in Hemsworth’s birth country of Australia. For Mann, who had been moving towards an interesting, digital approach of filmmaking, it he probably won’t get any more big budget projects any time soon.
1. ALOHA
Even a stellar cast lead by Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams, and Emma Stone couldn’t save this Cameron Crowe dud. With a budget of $37 million, it pulled in $26.3 million worldwide, but that wasn’t event the biggest issue this movie faced. Criticized for its racial stereotyping and whitewashing the cast, Crowe cast the very white Emma Stone a character of Chinese and Hawaiian descent named Allison Ng.
The actress went on record to say that she regretted taking the role. In a weekend that also saw the release of disaster movie San Andreas, it’s pretty clear which movie was the real disaster.
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