FOUR MORE BIG-BUDGET FAILS
Asura isn’t alone when it comes to big-budget movies with small returns, and when it comes to Hollywood budgets, the Chinese flop’s US$100 million (Dh3.6m) layout seems inconsequential.
It’s hard to give a definitive list of biggest flops – studios rarely divulge exact budgetary figures, and marketing can add a sizeable, usually unrevealed, sum to the final costs – in some cases a Hollywood movie’s marketing budget can be as much, or even more, than the cost of producing the movie itself. Sometimes this works (The Blair Witch Project was made for around $60,000, but a marketing spend of $1m on cinema’s first viral marketing campaign helped to pull in $246m at the box office worldwide.) Sometimes it doesn’t (The Wachowskis Brothers’ 2008 Matrix follow-up Speed Racer inflated its $120m production budget to around $200m with marketing. The film lost Warner Bros $114m, adjusted for inflation.
While we could debate the intricacies of exact budgets for hours, it’s safe to assume these box office disasters are close to the top of the list (all losses are adjusted for inflation):
Cutthroat Island (1995)
Production budget: $115m Estimated loss: $147m Even by today’s standards, $115m is a respectable budget for a movie. By 1995’s standards, it was huge – almost $200m today when adjusted for inflation. Add to this the fact that the movie’s male lead, Michael Douglas, pulled out during production, leaving the largely unknown Michael Modine to step in, and the vital fact that the film wasn’t very good, and it’s unsurprising it lost money. The film was at the time listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest lossmaking movie ever, though the category has since been retired.
Sinbad 2: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
Production budget: $60m Estimated loss: $166m This animated adventure following the legendary Iraqi pirate Sinbad and his crew actually isn’t a bad film, though it did raise some eyebrows for shifting the action to ancient Greece and using Brad Pitt’s Midwest twang to voice what should have been an Arab character. Unfortunately, however, the film suffered from one of the worst instances of poor timing in cinema history. It released right after the record-breaking, 3D animated, box-office-behemoth that was Finding Nemo. Quite simply, audiences were no longer interested in traditional 2D animation and, unlike Nemo, the film sank without trace. The losses the film made almost bankrupted Dreamworks, which has never produced a 2D animated feature since.
John Carter (2012)
Production budget: $263m Estimated loss: $213m Disney has long tried to talk down the losses made by its 2012 megabucks space action flop John Carter, suggesting a figure nearer the $150m mark. Documents released in 2014, however, revealed that, on top of the money Disney put into the adaptation of the Edgar Rice Boroughs novels, John Carter received more than $40m in tax refunds from the UK government for filming there, giving the movie the unenviable title of “only film to lose more than $200m (adjusted for inflation) in history”. The year 2012 could have been a bad one for Disney, which issued a profits warning after the John Carter flop. Fortunately, the $1.5 billion-grossing The Avengers released a couple of months after John Carter, softening the blow.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Production budget: $175m Estimated loss: $150m Guy Ritchie’s big-budget fantasy flop suggested the director might be best sticking to his trademark Brit flick gangster yarns. And also that David Beckham should stick to football. Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam starred in a movie that was supposed to kick-off a new Arthurian legend franchise for Warner Bros. After a $15m opening in the United States, and a 28 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it won’t.