Making popular movies is a difficult job, and not all of them can be as successful as
Avatar or
Titanic. With special effects getting better and better all the time, our summer blockbusters are getting steadily more spectacular…
…but also more and more expensive and at risk of flopping badly — bringing down the studios which launched them like giant, horribly overpriced guided missiles. As it turned out, the 2000s were a great decade for both epic movies and epic failures. Here we list ten of the biggest box office turkeys of the ’00s.
10. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had special effects which were hailed as “revolutionary” when it was released in 2001. France in 1793 was pretty revolutionary as well, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to have anything to do with it. The newly-developed “photorealistic” CGI effects gave the characters the creepy, blank faces of pod people (the so-called uncanny valley effect). The villain, General Hein, was a clichéd evil Patton wannabe who would make General Grievous from
Star Wars look three-dimensional by comparison. Even worse, don’t start looking for Sephiroth or Cloud in this movie, because it had jack to do with any Final Fantasy game ever released.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within lost about $82 million worldwide and essentially led to the collapse of Square Studios, the company that released it. Nice work.
9. Slither
Space slug splatterfest
Slither was meant to bring back the comedy-horror movie; instead, it practically killed it off. The tongue-in-cheek story involved a meteor carrying alien parasites crashing down in a one-horse American town and turning its population of good ‘ol boys into ravenous mutants. The movie was an slithering damp squib, making less than a quarter of its $29.5 million budget back in America after being released in 2006. Audiences saw its homages to ’70s and ’80s horror movies like
Night of the Creeps as attempts at ripping them off, and many people didn’t seem to even realize that it was supposed to be a parody. Maybe people were “zombied out;” the rush of bloody Romero-sploitation movies like
28 Days Later in the 2000s had left some sick to death of walking corpses and ready to embrace some nice sparkly vampires (of course, the success of
The Walking Dead might indicate that particular craze isn’t
quite over!).
8. Treasure Planet
Failing to learn from the colossal ’90s bomb that was Carolco’s
Cutthroat Island, Disney commissioned another big budget pirate movie in the 2000s.
Treasure Planet (2002) ambitiously combined hand-drawn 2D animation with advanced 3D computer graphics and the storyline of children’s classic
Treasure Island, which was re-written to ditch the pirate galleons and tropical islands for hoverboards and flying ships. The movie took four-and-a-half years to create, with over a thousand people involved in its production. It was bold, it involved a huge amount of effort from a small army of crew members, and it was an utterly insipid idea which made less than a quarter of what it cost to make in the US, losing up to $70 million worldwide. It just goes to show that Johnny Depp is the only one who can get away with this sort of cutthroat caper in a Disney movie nowadays.
7. The Alamo
This Billy Bob Thornton vehicle was so unmemorable that most critics couldn’t even be bothered to hate it; most responded with a thundering “meh.” Lacking the patriotic message of the 1960s John Wayne movie or any aspiration to re-write history,
The Alamo was such a solidly middle-of-the-road effort that it failed to stir any emotions in its audiences at all. The movie also had the misfortune of being up against the massively successful biblical torture porn movie
The Passion of the Christ in its first weekend, back in 2004. Audiences treated it like a Leonard Nimoy live concert and stayed well away, with the result that the movie became the second biggest box office bomb of all time, making just $26 million of the $145 million it cost to make. Boom!
6. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Legendarily over-budget “comedy”
The Adventures of Pluto Nash only succeeded in pissing away every shred of credibility Eddie Murphy had regained with the
Shrek franchise. The virtually joke-free 2002 caper was a mess of terrible action scenes, dated references and nonsensical plot twists which made back virtually none of its money at the box office. Murphy showed all of his worst qualities as an actor, seeming to wander through the movie in a semi-daze when he wasn’t hamming it up like an even balder William Shatner. Why anyone thought it was a good idea to spend $120 million on this rubbish is a mystery, with a return from theaters of scarcely $7 million about all this piece of space junk could have hoped for.
5. Sahara
Matthew McConaughey is basically the cheaper version of Brendan Frasier so it was appropriate that he was chosen to star in 2005′s
Sahara, an action-comedy designed to cash in on the success of the
Mummy franchise. The movie featured swashbuckling Underwater and Marine Agency agent Dirk Pitt and his various sidekicks attempting to discover the source of a disease sweeping across Africa whilst fighting sinister third-world dictators and their corporate stooges. Unfortunately for its creators, the movie ended up being anything but low-rent and was plagued by massive production and distribution costs. Despite doing well in theaters and being trashily entertaining viewing,
Sahara lost over $120 million at the box office, which just goes to show that it’s expensive to have movie helicopters being shot down by cannonballs…
4. Speed Racer
Based on a Japanese cartoon best known for its irresistibly catchy theme tune, the live-action version of
Speed Racer was critically panned and lost more than $100 million at the box office following its 2008 release. The movie’s plot, which featured an 18-year-old driver trying to break into the world of automobile racing, was derided by critics for being conflict-free and aimed at too young an audience. The film was also not helped by PETA accusations of animal cruelty towards one of the chimps involved in production, and its directors, the Wachowski brothers, being more familiar with kung fu than car fu. Despite its box office flop, the movie’s creators were reportedly still optimistic about selling tie-in merchandise. Instead of making the flick they should have just sold the theme tune as a weapon: having an endless loop of it stuck in your head is guaranteed to drive anyone nuts…
3. Red Planet
Red Planet: a dull Val Kilmar/Carrie-Anne Moss sci-fi movie which looked similar to
Apollo 13 but removed the drama, characterization and any relevance to real-life events. In the future world of 2057, mankind has sent a manned mission Mars in an attempt to find out what went wrong with its attempt to give the planet a breathable atmosphere. A good concept for a movie, but unfortunately most of the end result consisted of astronauts wandering aimlessly round a desert shot with red filters to make it look like Mars, something about flesh-eating insects, and Carrie-Ann Moss’ ass floating around in zero gravity (not that we’re complaining about the last part). Audiences reacted badly to its glacial pacing, mechanical performances and the lack of any exciting moments (except Tom Sizemore’s character being eaten in the third act), and this 2000 movie was a total bomb which lost nearly $65 million worldwide.
2. Town and Country
A virtually forgotten 2001 rom-com,
Town and Country is only really notable for being just the second movie which Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty have starred in together following 1981′s
Reds (yeah,
that notable). Oh, and for being one of the biggest bombs in cinematic history, losing close to $100 million at the box office. The “plot” involved an aging stud played by Beatty debating whether to tell his wife about his recent affair with a cellist. Blander than the blandest of bland, the movie was shooting low, but even then failed to hit what it was aiming for. Critics derided it as crude, smug and overly WASP-ish, and it was such a stain on the records of its stars that most of them took extended breaks from the film industry until the bad publicity had died down.
1. Battlefield Earth
The 21st century has seen many great disasters, but possibly none so great as the cinematic Hindenburg which was 2000′s
Battlefield Earth. Celebrity Scientologist John Travolta produced, promoted and starred in this stinker of a movie, which was based on a book of the same name by the “religion”’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The movie depicted a post-apocalyptic future in which Travolta’s character led stupid-looking dreadlocked aliens in high-heeled boots to enslave humanity. At the end of the movie, the human resistance, led by Barry Pepper and his collection of cavemen and bad actors, managed to defeat the aliens by shooting them down with the help of thousand-year-old planes in a way that made
Independence Day look like
Top Gun and
Top Gun look like a gritty documentary about fighter combat. It flopped, it was panned, it was trash, and it brought attention to Scientology in exactly the opposite way that its creators had intended. That its financial loss may have been as little is $15 million was surely scant consolation. Definitely a contender for the biggest turkey of all time.
