Transcription
Hollywood has a very specific type of amnesia. Studios will watch a $200 million movie crater into the ground, lose half the investment, fire three executives, and then turn around and greenlight the exact same mistake 18 months later. It happens every single year without fail, going all the way back to the 1970s. One movie per year, one catastrophic, embarrassing, how did anyone sign off on this failure? And we're going to go through all of them. Hi, my name is Bernard, and this is Frame Theory.
The 1970s. The '70s were a genuinely fascinating decade for Hollywood, because the old studio system had just collapsed. New Hollywood was in full swing. Directors had more creative control than they'd ever had before. And studios were throwing money at passion projects like they were printing it in the basement. Some of that produced masterpieces. Some of it produced absolute disasters. Sometimes both in the same year.
1970. The decade opens with Waterloo, a massive Italian-Soviet co-production about Napoleon's final military campaign. Rod Steiger playing Napoleon, Christopher Plummer as Wellington, a cast of thousands, literally. They used over 15,000 Soviet soldiers as extras. The budget landed somewhere around $25 million, which in 1970 money is almost incomprehensible. It grossed just over 1 million in North America. 1 million. They hired 15,000 soldiers and made $1 million. The film is actually quite good, which makes it more painful. It just cost way too much, and nobody showed up. Dino De Laurentiis produced it, and somehow walked away from this experience still willing to make enormous, expensive movies, which tells you everything about how the film industry works.
1971 gives us When Eight Bells Toll, a spy thriller based on an Alistair MacLean novel, modest flop, but a flop nonetheless. Nobody remembers it. Moving on.
1972, 1776, a filmed stage musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jack Warner personally funded it, pulled it from the original cut because he thought it was too long, forced reshoots, and still couldn't get audiences interested. It made back about 2/3 of its budget. The founding fathers apparently were not a box office draw.
1973 is where things get genuinely ugly. Lost Horizon is a musical remake of a 1937 Frank Capra classic. Columbia spent $12 million on it. It made $2 million. The reviews were savage. One critic called it the most expensive amateur night in Hollywood history. The soundtrack album by Burt Bacharach, no less, also bombed. When even Burt Bacharach can't save you, it's time to go home.
1974, The Little Prince, another musical, another disaster. Stanley Donen directed it. Bob Fosse was in it as the snake, which is actually kind of amazing casting if you think about it. The film cost 15 million, made just under 1 and 1/2 million in North America. The studio couldn't figure out who the audience was. Too adult for kids, too whimsical for adults. That exact same problem has killed about 40 movies since then, and Hollywood still hasn't learned.
1975 gives us Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love, a musical comedy that was so poorly received that Bogdanovich actually took out full-page ads in trade publications to apologize for it. I want to sit with that for a second. The director bought ad space to say sorry. 22 million spent, under a million back. Bogdanovich was coming off The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. And this essentially ended his run as Hollywood's golden boy. One bad musical and it's over. The industry has no mercy.
1976. Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill. Critically divisive, commercially ignored, made back less than half its budget. Altman later said he was trying to deconstruct the myth of American heroism. The audience said they were trying to watch something entertaining on a Friday night. Both sides had a point.
1977. Exorcist 2: The Heretic. The original Exorcist had been one of the biggest hits in film history. So, Warner Brothers did what Warner Brothers does and immediately greenlit a sequel without a plan, a script, or apparently a single conversation about what made the first one work. John Boorman directed it. Linda Blair came back. Richard Burton was there looking like he genuinely didn't know what movie he was in. It opened huge because everyone assumed it would be as terrifying as the original. It was not. Audiences laughed at the screening. Actually laughed. Critics buried it. The film made back about a third of its budget domestically. Warner Brothers reportedly tried to pull it from theaters to re-edit it after the first weekend. That doesn't usually end well.
1978. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Robert Stigwood produced it. The Bee Gees starred in it. It was a jukebox musical built around Beatles songs and it is genuinely one of the strangest things ever committed to film. Aerosmith is in it. Peter Frampton is in it. George Burns is in it playing Mr. Kite while singing a Beatles song. The budget was around 13 million. The worldwide gross was about 3 and 1/2 million. The Beatles catalog did not appreciate in value from this experience.
1979. Steven Spielberg made 1941. Yes, that Steven Spielberg. Fresh off Jaws and Close Encounters, he made a World War II comedy that cost $35 million and returned about $23 million domestically. The film has its defenders and honestly there are some genuinely funny moments in it. But after Jaws and Close Encounters, the expectation was impossible to meet. Spielberg himself has called it self-indulgent. That's the word directors use when they want to say they got carried away without actually admitting they got carried away.
The 1980s.
1980, Heaven's Gate. No list like this exists without it. Michael Cimino had just won Best Director for The Deer Hunter. United Artists handed him $44 million for a Western epic. He spent it all and then kept spending. The overruns were legendary. 3 hours and 39 minutes long. Critics destroyed it. Pulled from theaters after 1 week. Recut, rereleased, still bombed. United Artists, one of the oldest studios in Hollywood, was effectively wiped out by a single film. MGM bought the wreckage. Heaven's Gate didn't just flop, it ended an era.
In 1981, Inchon. A Korean War epic financed by the Unification Church. Yes, that one. With Laurence Olivier playing General MacArthur. $46 million budget, $2 million gross. Olivier later said it was the worst film he ever made, which is saying something because Olivier made a lot of films.
1982, The Pirates of Penzance. Another musical, another catastrophe. Hollywood was doing musicals in the '80s like they were legally required to. This one cost $15 million and made seven.
1983, Brainstorm. A science fiction film where scientists invent a device that records human experiences. Natalie Wood drowned us during production and the film sat in limbo for over a year while MGM and the director fought about whether to finish it. They finished it. Nobody came. 20 million spent, 6 million back.
1984, The Bounty with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins. Gorgeous film, genuinely well reviewed, but it was the third major Mutiny on the Bounty adaptation and audiences apparently decided two was enough. Made back barely half its $22 million budget in North America.
1985, Santa Claus: The Movie. Alexander Salkind, who had produced Superman, decided to do the same thing for Father Christmas. $50 million budget, the film grossed about 23 million domestically. Dudley Moore is in it doing his best. The Salkinds had already been losing money on the Superman sequels at this point. This was the one that finally finished them off as major Hollywood players. On the bright side, at least the movie has a certain charm if you watch it at Christmas with low expectations. Very low expectations.
In 1986, Howard the Duck. George Lucas produced it. Lucas, the man who made Star Wars, produced a movie about a talking duck from another planet who comes to Earth and has a romantic subplot with Lea Thompson. The budget was 37 million, the gross was 37 million. So, technically it broke even except it didn't because marketing costs weren't included and also it's Howard the Duck. Universal and Lucasfilm reportedly lost over $20 million on it. Lucas used his share of the profits to fund a little company called Pixar. So, Howard the Duck accidentally helped create Toy Story. You can't make this stuff up.
1987, Ishtar. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play two terrible singer-songwriters who accidentally get caught up in a CIA operation in Morocco. The film cost $51 million. It made just over 14 million. Elaine May directed it and the production was notoriously chaotic. It became such a famous flop that the word Ishtar basically became shorthand for Hollywood hubris for an entire decade, which is a little unfair because the film is actually funnier than its reputation suggests. But when two of the biggest stars in the world make a movie that loses $40 million, people are going to remember it.
1988, Sunset, a Blake Edwards film starring Bruce Willis as Tom Mix and James Garner as Wyatt Earp. They investigate a murder together in Hollywood in the 1920s. Sounds like it should work. It didn't. 15 million budget, about 3 and 1/2 million back.
1989, Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Visually extraordinary, completely chaotic to produce. Budget ballooned from 23 million to 46 million. The US distributor, Columbia, quietly buried it with virtually no marketing and it made just under 8 million domestically. Gilliam later said Columbia was embarrassed by how much it cost and essentially gave up on it. Gilliam and studios have a complicated relationship. Actually, it's not that complicated. They hate working with each other.
The 1990s.
1990, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian De Palma directing. Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis. Based on Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel. $47 million budget, 15 million back. The production was so disastrous that a journalist named Julie Salamon was given behind-the-scenes access throughout filming and then wrote a book about what went wrong. The book, called The Devil's Candy, is genuinely one of the best accounts of a movie falling apart in real time ever written. The film itself is remembered mostly for being the movie that briefly made everyone think Tom Hanks couldn't open a picture. He recovered quickly.
1991, Hudson Hawk. Bruce Willis wanted to make a comedic action caper. He was the biggest star in the world after Die Hard. The studio gave him 65 million dollars. The film made 17 million worldwide. Willis co-wrote the story himself, which at this point in the list, you will recognize as a warning sign. And our stars writing their own vehicles have a very specific track record.
1992, Chaplin. Robert Downey Jr. gave an extraordinary performance as Charlie Chaplin, and almost nobody saw it. Not technically the biggest flop of the year in absolute terms, but the turn on investment is brutal. 30 million spent, 9 and a half million in North America. At least Downey got an Oscar nomination out of it.
1993, Last Action Hero. This is one of the great what if disasters of the decade. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the biggest star on Earth. Shane Black, one of the best action writers working, had a draft. The concept, a kid gets pulled into an action movie, is clever on paper. 85 million dollar budget. The film opened the same weekend as Jurassic Park. Not the week before Jurassic Park. Not the week after. The same weekend. It made 50 million domestic on an 85 million budget, and Columbia reportedly lost 60 million dollars on the whole project. Someone at that studio approved that release date while Jurassic Park was sitting on the schedule, and I genuinely want to know what that conversation sounded like.
1994, I'll Do Anything. James L. Brooks directed it as a musical. Test audiences hated the musical numbers, so he cut all the musical numbers out of a musical and released it as a drama. It still didn't work. The making of this film is honestly more interesting than the film itself.
1995, Cutthroat Island. Renny Harlin directing Geena Davis in a pirate adventure. $98 million budget. $11 million back in North America. It single-handedly killed Carolco Pictures, one of the major independent studios of the era. Carolco had produced The Terminator films, Total Recall, Basic Instinct. Cutthroat Island wiped them out completely. The film also set a Guinness World Record for biggest box office loss, which is the kind of record nobody wants.
1996, Mulholland Falls. A neo-noir starring Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen. $25 million spent $6 million back. Beautifully shot film that arrived in a year where the audience for grown-up crime dramas had already been satisfied by L.A. Confidential, which was still coming, and The Usual Suspects, which had just left. The timing was off and the marketing was worse.
1997, The Postman. Kevin Costner's follow-up to Waterworld. Waterworld had been a massive, expensive, troubled production that actually turned a modest profit eventually. So, Costner did it again. The Postman cost $80 million and made $17 million domestically. Costner directed it himself, starred in it, and the film runs 3 hours. 3 hours about a postman in a dystopian future. Costner has since said he stands by the film. He is in the minority on one.
1998, Meet Joe Black. Brad Pitt plays Death who takes human form and falls in love with a woman while escorting her father to the afterlife. A $65 million budget, $44 million back in North America. Not a catastrophic loss, but for a film with Brad Pitt at the height of his post Fight Club fame, these are genuinely embarrassing numbers. The film is nearly 3 hours long, which is a theme here. Someone in Hollywood keeps green-lighting 3-hour movies and then being surprised when audiences don't come back for a second viewing.
1999, Wild Wild West. Will Smith had turned down The Matrix to make this. That fact alone deserves a moment of silence. Will Smith, Barry Sonnenfeld, a $170 million budget, and the result was a steampunk western that made $113 million domestic, which sounds okay until you factor in the marketing and realize the studio lost somewhere in the range of $40 million. Smith has spoken about it publicly, basically admitting The Matrix decision haunted him. At least one of those movies holds up, and it wasn't the one with the giant mechanical spider.
The 2000s.
2000s, Battlefield Earth. John Travolta spent years trying to get this made. It's based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. $44 million budget, $21 million worldwide. The film was shot entirely in Dutch angles, meaning the camera is tilted at all times, which critics found disorienting at best and migraine-inducing at worst. It swept the Razzie Awards, winning every single category it was nominated for. Franchise Pictures, the production company, was later sued by investors and a judge found they had fraudulently inflated the budget. So, on top of everything else, financial crime. Battlefield Earth truly gave 100%.
2001. Josie and the Pussycats. This one actually deserves more credit than it ever got. It's a genuinely sharp satire of pop music and corporate branding that was so far ahead of the cultural conversation that audiences completely missed it. 22 million budget, 14 million back. Critics mostly dismissed it. Two decades later, people started revisiting it and calling it a misunderstood masterpiece. Hollywood was too early, the audience was too late, and nobody made any money. That's the tragedy of the 2000s indie comedy in a nutshell.
2002. The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Eddie Murphy. 100 million dollar budget, four and a half million in North America. There is not a lot more to say about this. It set what was then a record for the worst opening weekend ever for a film on over 2,000 screens. The studio, Warner Brothers, had actually shelved it for 2 years before releasing it, which in hindsight was perhaps a clue.
2003. Gigli. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. The tabloid romance of the decade collided with what might be the most infamous critical reception since Heaven's Gate. 54 million dollar budget, 6 million worldwide. The reviews were almost poetic in their cruelty. Affleck has since rebuilt his career entirely, and his recent performances have been genuinely excellent. So, the story has a happy ending, but Gigli is the reason that happy ending was necessary in the first place.
2004. Around the World in 80 Days. Jackie Chan. 110 million dollar budget. 24 million in North America. Disney produced it. This was the same year Disney had Pirates of the Caribbean doing extraordinary business, so you have to wonder what meeting happened where both of these films were green-lit simultaneously, and nobody thought to ask whether two giant adventure films with very different quality levels might interfere with each other.
2005, Stealth, a Navy pilot film where an artificial intelligence stealth jet goes rogue. 135 million-dollar budget, 32 million worldwide. Jessica Biel, Jamie Fox, Josh Lucas. Sony lost nearly a hundred million dollars on this. The film has essentially been erased from the cultural memory. You could walk up to most people today and say the word Stealth, and they would have absolutely no idea what you were referring to.
2006, Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan. The interesting thing about Shyamalan's career in the 2000s is that you can actually trace the exact moment the studio stopped giving him unlimited trust. This was that moment. 70 million-dollar budget, 42 million worldwide. Warner Brothers passed on it. Disney passed on it. Universal made it. Everyone lost money. Shyamalan cast himself in a major supporting role as a writer whose work would change the world, which is the kind of directorial decision that makes studio executives visibly uncomfortable in test screenings.
2007, The Invasion, the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, right after Casino Royale made him a star. 65 million-dollar budget, 15 million in North America. The producers pulled it from Hirsch Spiegel, the original director, and brought in the Wachowskis to reshoot significant portions of it. The result satisfied nobody and cost Warner Brothers somewhere in the range of 60 million dollars.
2008, Speed Racer. The Wachowskis again. They had earned enormous creative freedom after the Matrix trilogy, which in terms of pure box office had made over a billion dollars combined. Speed Racer cost a hundred and twenty million dollars and made ninety-three million worldwide. Visually, it's one of the most extraordinary things ever put on a movie screen. Genuinely unlike anything else. The audience at the time found it overwhelming, like watching someone play a video game while eating a bag of Skittles in a moving car. It has since built an enormous cult following and a generation of filmmakers cited as an influence. But at the time, Warner Brothers lost nearly fifty million dollars and the Wachowskis never got another major studio blank check.
2009, Land of the Lost, Will Ferrell. One hundred million dollar budget. Forty-nine million in North America. Universal had expected this to open the way Anchorman and Elf had opened. It did not. Ferrell comedies are not naturally one hundred million dollar movies. Someone confused the success of his modest comedies with an appetite for a massive tentpole version of the same thing. The two things are not the same. Hollywood makes this mistake repeatedly. Scaling up a comedian's budget until they're no longer making a comedy. They're making an event film with jokes in it and audiences stop showing up.
The 2010s.
2010, The Wolfman. Universal's monster reboot with Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Emily Blunt. One hundred and fifty million dollar budget. One hundred and forty million worldwide. Technically, it almost broke even. But after marketing costs, Universal lost somewhere between fifty and sixty million. The film spent years in development hell and went through so many reshoots and editorial overhauls that by the time it finally came out, it barely resembled the movie that had been originally shot. Hopkins has described the experience in interviews with a level of detachment that suggests he checked out approximately 3 weeks into production.
2011 Mars Needs Moms Disney A $150 million budget $39 million worldwide. One of the worst openings in Disney's history. The film used performance capture technology, the same process Robert Zemeckis had used for Polar Express and Beowulf. And audiences found the characters deeply unsettling in a way that's hard to articulate but impossible to ignore. The uncanny valley problem, that slightly off quality where animated humans look almost real but not quite hit this film like a freight train. Disney shut down the ImageMovers digital studio shortly after. The era of performance capture family films was effectively over.
2012, John Carter, Disney again. $250 million budget, possibly more. The film made $284 million worldwide, which sounds reasonable until you realize that number needs to roughly double to break even when marketing is included. Disney wrote off $200 million on this single film, one of the largest write-downs in studio history. Andrew Stanton, who had directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E, made his live-action debut here. And the studio gave him everything he asked for. In hindsight, several people have pointed out that the marketing campaign never once explained to general audiences what the film was actually about. The trailer showed action and aliens and a man jumping very high and nothing else. If you didn't know the 100-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs source material, you had essentially no idea what you were buying a ticket to see.
2013, The Lone Ranger, Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer, Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer. $215 million budget. The plan was to do for The Lone Ranger what Pirates of the Caribbean had done for the pirate genre. That did not happen. It made $163 million worldwide. Disney lost between $150 and $190 on this. The casting of Depp as Tonto, a Native American character, drew significant criticism before the film even opened. The film itself is deeply confused about whether it's a comedy or an adventure or a deconstruction of the Western genre. It tries to be all three at once and succeeds at none of them.
2014, Transcendence. Johnny Depp as a scientist whose consciousness gets uploaded to the internet. $100 million budget. $23 million in North America. This was Wally Pfister's directorial debut. Pfister had been Christopher Nolan's cinematographer for years, won the Oscar for Inception, and the expectation was enormous. The film was a critical and commercial disaster, and Pfister has not directed another feature film since. Which is a shame because the visual craft is genuinely there. The script just isn't.
2015, Pan. Warner Brothers origin story for Peter Pan with Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard and a cast that included Rooney Mara in a role that generated considerable controversy around casting choices. $150 million budget. $35 million in North America. It opened below expectations in every single market simultaneously. When a wide release children's film starring Hugh Jackman opening in late October can't find an audience, something has gone fundamentally wrong in development.
2016, Ben-Hur. The remake of the 1959 Charlton Heston epic that almost nobody asked for. $100 million budget. $11 million in North America. $11 million. The original Ben-Hur won 11 Academy Awards and is one of the most celebrated films ever made. This version made $11 million domestically. That symmetry is almost poetic. Paramount and MGM split the losses, which at least meant neither studio bore the full humiliation alone.
2017, The Mummy. Universal's attempt to launch a Dark Universe shared monster franchise with Tom Cruise in the lead. $125 million budget. 80 million in North America. The studio had already announced multiple connected films with A-list actors before this one even opened. Russell Crowe was playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and was clearly set up for his own spin-off. Sofia Boutella was a terrific mummy. None of it mattered. The film tried so hard to set up future installments that it forgot to be a satisfying movie on its own terms. The Dark Universe was quietly canceled before a single additional film entered production. It is the most spectacular failure of franchise building since the '90s. Attempted to turn every action movie into a series.
2018, Robin Hood. Taron Egerton as a medieval action hero. Robin Hood in a film that felt like it was filmed inside a video game cutscene. $100 million budget. 30 million worldwide. It opened to reviews so uniformly negative that the studio reportedly knew within 48 hours it was over. Lionsgate has had a complicated relationship with big budget action films throughout this period and Robin Hood represented a kind of rock bottom. The film's production designer appeared to have no reference points beyond three other movies made in the previous decade. At least they committed.
2019, Gemini Man. Ang Lee directed Will Smith playing a hitman being hunted by a younger clone of himself. Also Will Smith. $138 million budget. $173 million worldwide. Looks better than it sounds, but the marketing costs push this firmly into loss territory. Ang Lee shot it at 120 frames per second, an experimental high frame rate format that required special projection equipment that most theaters didn't have. The result was that the majority of audiences saw it in standard format anyway, which somewhat defeated the entire technological point. Lee has now made two consecutive experimental format films that lost money and tested audience patience, which is a difficult position to be in when you're trying to get a third one greenlit.
The 2020s.
2020, Dolittle. Robert Downey Jr.'s first post-Avengers Endgame film. Universal paid him an enormous salary to play a doctor who talks to animals. The film reportedly cost $175 million in production alone, not including marketing, partly because of extensive and expensive reshoots. It made $179 million worldwide. Technically, that's more than it cost to make, but factor in the marketing spend and Universal lost somewhere between 50 and $100 million. The reshoots were reportedly so extensive that a different director was brought in to help salvage it. For a film built entirely on the goodwill of arguably the most beloved actor in the world at that exact moment, this was an extraordinary squandering of timing and opportunity.
2021, Infinite. Mark Wahlberg, a science fiction action film about people who can remember their past lives and use those memories as combat skills. Paramount budgeted it at $65 million, then quietly moved it directly to Paramount Plus after the pandemic with barely any theatrical release, which is technically not a box office flop because it never really had a theatrical run. But the film was designed as a theatrical release and ended up as a streaming dump, which is a different kind of failure. The reviews were catastrophic. Wahlberg has made several of these mid-budget action films that have underperformed in the 2020s, and each one seems to slightly revise the industry's estimation of his ability to carry a film.
2022, Amsterdam, David O. Russell directing Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington. Amsterdam had one of the more impressive ensemble casts in recent memory. It also had a $90 million budget made $6 million in North America. $6 million against $90 million. Disney buried it with minimal marketing, possibly because internal test screenings indicated what was coming. The film is based loosely on a real historical conspiracy involving a plot to overthrow the United States government in the 1930s, which is not exactly a premise that screams date night. Russell has not directed another film since.
2023, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Here's the painful one. Harrison Ford returning as Indiana Jones at 80 years old for a final adventure. The film cost $300 million to produce, partly because of extensive de-aging visual effects, and made $384 million worldwide. That sounds like a profit until you add the estimated $150 million marketing budget, and suddenly Disney has lost somewhere between $140 and $160 million on one of the most recognizable characters in cinema history. The de-aging technology is impressive, but the film around it never justifies the cost. The opening sequence is extraordinary. Then the film has to figure out what to do for the remaining 2 and 1/2 hours, and it doesn't quite manage it. A sad ending to a franchise that deserved better than a financial disaster as its final chapter.
2024, Joker: Folie à Deux. The first Joker made over a billion dollars on a $55 million budget. So, Warner Brothers handed Todd Phillips $200 million to make a musical sequel. A musical. The film made $236 million worldwide, but once marketing is included, the loss lands somewhere between 150 and $200 million. The audience who showed up for the first film simply didn't come back. Musical numbers alienated action fans. The dark tone alienated musical fans. Phillips essentially ended the character in a way that made any sequel impossible. Some people think that was deliberate. He burned it down on purpose and Warner Brothers paid for the matches.
50 years of this comes down to one pattern. Hollywood knows exactly how these disasters happen. They've studied them, documented them, and discussed them in every meeting room on every lot. And every single year, someone signs the check anyway. Same time next year.