John Carter could be Hollywood’s biggest loser
Ultracompetitive movie studios rarely want to sit atop this box office list. When Walt Disney Co. said Monday that it expected its sci-fi movie John Carter to lose about $200 million, it very likely shot the intergalactic box office bomb to the top of Hollywood’s biggest loser chart.
If so – and box office math is always a little tricky in Tinseltown – the megaflop would achieve iconic status by surpassing the 1995 Geena Davis-matthew Modine pirate flick Cutthroat Island that the Guinness Book of World Records lists as the biggest bomb of alltime.
That movie lost $147 million, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which also puts the film at the top of its list.
Infamous misfires like director Ron Howard’s The Alamo, Eddie Murphy’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, the Matthew Mcconaughey-Penelope Cruz action film Sahara and director Robert Zemeckis’s 2011 animated film Mars Needs Moms all passed the dubious $140-million loss threshold, according to Wikipedia.
Of course, any movie box office list is subject to serious interpretation. The Wikipedia list, for instance, has converted the film’s ticket sales to inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars, but includes only worldwide box office and not DVD or TV sales.
Sometimes it’s not revenues that sink a film. Director Andrew Stanton’s movie has a reasonably strong $184-million worldwide box office, so far.
The key problem for John Carter was that it cost more than $350 million to produce and market, according to industry sources, who say even that number is likely understated.
There can be no doubt John Carter will go down in history as a box office bomb, and with its entrance into Hollywood’s Hall of Shame, it is interesting to note that six of the top 15 movie misfires have been made since 2005, when Hollywood has been in high gear with pricey, special effects budgets.