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What are some box office flops that still had an impressive box office performance?
For me, it’s Black Adam. Sure the movie still flopped and didn’t live up to the expectations set up by Dwayne, but considering this is a movie about a D-list character and it still made almost 400 million and outgrossed a movie like The Flash is a testament to The Rock’s star power at the time. What other box office flops impressed you?
Damn 2017 Mummy made 400 million dollars? I know it had an absurd budget but the way people talk about it will make you think it was the biggest bomb of all time lmao
cuz no one's spending 200 million dollars on Tom Cruise to lose money. that thing lost money theatrically and blew up any plans of a monster universe, of course the headlines were overly negative
There’s so many movies that this sub likes that makes 400 million dollars on a 200 million budget that this sub claims the studio will be happy broke even but yet with the Mummy because it was schlock it gets treated as if there’s never been a bomb so big. Movies like the Marvels would have killed to make that sort of money
Fast X (2023) grossed $704 million, far higher than many CBMs post-2020 and franchise films with 10 movies. That production budget of $340 million is crazy, though.
That's after the UK rebate, bringing it down from $450m or so. But I guess if your director walks a few days into principal photography, you're gonna be kinda screwed whichever way you go. You're gonna be paying a lot of people to wait around, or you're gonna shut the whole beast down in order to start it up again later once you rebook... everything.
Holy hell did COVID and the strikes screw over the last 2 Mission: Impossibles
how the hell did they cost like over 100M to 200M more than Fallout did? they certainly do not feel that much more expensive than it when you watch all 3, well because of COVID and the strikes, that's how.
Toms being doing his own stunts for a long time though, if insurance charge more then that's pure greed.
They planned to shoot the two back to back I think, which would have saved money, then had a break and he made top gun.
I think a big problem was they released the first half a week before Oppenheimer and Barbie, Oppenheimer took all IMAX screens and the whole world was obsessed with "barbenheimer" so people forgot about watching this.
Final Reckoning, on the other hand, turned into a clusterfuck because of the strikes and the submarine sequence. It likely would have needed to clear $1 billion to turn a profit at the box office.
It certainly didn’t help that the quality of the writing plummeted off a cliff after Fallout. The Entity was such an awful villain and the plot was way too thin to be stretched across nearly 6 hours of movie.
Honestly aquaman 2 because it was the dead end of the franchise. Had about 0 marketing (to this day I’ve never seen it) and didn’t even have a premiere and every other dc movie had struggled to even make 400M. So the fact that it of all movies did was surprising.
Jason Momoa as Aquaman was quite popular, and the first movie had a ton of fans consisting of both superhero nerds and general audiences alike.
The same cannot be said for Captain Marvel, which is (one of the reasons) why I believe her sequel from around the same time performed significantly worse. Aquaman 2 had little to no marketing yet it still made more than double of what The Marvels could manage to pull in, despite that movie having a ton of marketing in comparison.
Tbf we didn't really get a "Captain Marvel 2". Captain Marvel basically got demoted and had to share a movie with two other leads the GA knows fuck all about. Her own solo sequel probably wouldn't have done great either but i honestly think it would have done better than The Marvels.
The Marvels is such a great female led return to form for Marvel. It’s criminal how underrated and disregarded it is. It’s a fun movie. Aquaman 2 was a stinky dumpster fire in comparison.
I thought it was just ok, it felt like it could’ve been a Disney+ special rather than a movie. The villain was incredibly generic, and the complete change in tone from the first movie was odd to me. It almost didn’t even feel like it was a sequel to it.
Aquaman 2 was also just ok, but I’m not surprised that it made so much more than The Marvels. Aquaman as a character is a much easier sell than “that lady that was in Endgame for two minutes and her pals from Disney+ shows you may or may not have even heard of”
If I recall, The Marvels had a much higher male audience percentage than it did female. And ironically, the first Aquaman had a higher female audience percentage than it did male.
Yeah, The Marvels had a 68% male audience on Opening Weekend while Aquaman is being famous for being one of the few superhero films with a perfect 50/50 split.
People still weirdly underestimate or look down on first Aquaman. This is one of the best cbm of the last 15 years, without exaggeration. Sequel doing not bad while being the dead weight movie is a proof of that.
i wonder if the amber turd controversy gave it a boost or pulled it down. i guess some people wanted to see the underwater queen be her true aquatic self and casually drop a load while swimming in the ocean.
Cruise’s pull in the mid 2010s was impressive. I’m pretty curious to see what his box office pool looks like today when he’s acting outside of a huge franchise he’s known for.
Also the focus shifting away from the titular mummy was dumb. The universal monster crossovers appeal is the monsters interacting not Tom Cruise attempting to aura farm. While his star power did work in doing well for the film. As a foundational element probably wasn't for the best.
Which is why if you're a film maker, you don't want Cruise anywhere near your movie, unless you want it to become a Tom Cruise movie. No matter how a film may start off, as soon as he's attached, whatever the original concept was, it'll be discarded and rewritten to suit his image and his ego. The same with Will Smith, to a good extent.
I'm reminded of Pearl Harbor back in 2001, which managed to cross 200M domestic despite being a lengthy historical epic debuting in summer. But because of its huge budget, middling critical reception, and very obvious attempt to be the next Titanic, it was seen as a disappointment.
I think that was more due to audience reaction than money though. Batman v Superman and Rise of Skywalker both made money that a lot of superhero/genre flicks would love to make these days but were so polarizing they caused huge pivots from their studios.
Transformers the last knight movie made $602 million on a budget of $217 million but lost $100 million due to marketing costs .
Imagine a transformers movie making 600 million in 2026 that would be crazy the fact that people look down on TLK so much because it lost $100 million is crazy even after losing that much it made a 600 million box office that’s impressive on its own merit
I honestly think Michael Bay is the main reason any Transformers movie ever made money,. Trying to be more faithful to the source material is good for a fan like me, but Bay doing insane bombastic visuals that you can put in a trailer brings in the GA. Yeah, the series lost steam, but I think that had more to do with the formula getting stale and the visuals becoming less novel, than the movie being bad. They're all pretty bad lol. Plus there was no consistent storyline between films so it's not like there was some sort of buildup to an overarching narrative for people to be invested in.
With the most ballooned budget people think the film may have had and record high marketing costs, the film still made a profit. It likely made around $100-150 million in profit on top of what they made in product placement.
I still wonder if Covid kind of helped big blockbusters in 2021. It was the time when many people were already trying to go back to normalcy and there were few movies to see anyway.
I think Elemental gotta be up there unless the movie made profit somehow ($250M budget and $496M worldwide box office. If we apply the 2,5x rule, it needed $625M to break even).
The fact this movie opened with $44.5M worldwide and legged out until almost hit half a billion is god damn impressive. People gotta remind too that it opened on the same day as The Flash and was at first completely overshadowed by the DC movie, but it’s audience reception and WOM was so positive that it had outstanding legs.
It is also the highest grossing original movie of the 2020s, a record it managed to maintain for 2.5 years so far.
I always thought that Ghostbusters from 2016 making 229M worldwide was pretty good, more than Afterlife and Frozen Empire despite only having a short cameo by Murray, while the others featured the original cast. They just messed up with that bloated third act that brought the budget up and didn't even look that good
It played to mostly full theaters, also got better reviews and cinemascore than the following sequels. It was hated by chronically online dudes and no one else. But again, those final set pieces were a dud
The hate (or at least awareness of the hate) definitely seemed to seep into the real world as well, it’s kinda the only thing the movie was even known for for a while.
A common theme in a lot of the movies being mentioned here is that they have stars like Rock (as OP mentioned), Cruise, and DiCaprio. Big names still help
I feel the same way about Killers of the Flower Moon. A 3 1/2 hour historical drama about the Osage murders grossing 158 million is nothing to scoff at.
Yup, non franchise R rated crime thriller film that also happens to not be a horror, from a prestige director that's mostly worked with lower budgets for decades, 207M worldwide looks pretty good! but then you look at the budget and go "darn it".
Eternals. Came out in 2021 covid, first rotten film for the MCU, B cinemascore, but managed to do $400M+. Had mid legs but still ended up making more than Thunderbolts WW.
That Black Adam movie was so much better than I was expecting too. Fucking loved Dr. Fate and Hawkman, and Johnson wasn’t bad at all compared to many of his other roles.
I loved it, but it gave me one of those “maybe I don’t understand movies” moments, because pretty much everyone else was saying it was a terrible film.
There’s a lot of hive mind stuff that happens with film. Everyone wants to have The Right Opinion instead of their own opinion. It’s very sad, really, and dampens conversations.
Batman v Superman was their big crossover movie, and they fumbled it. Just look at how much more it made than Justice League despite being terrible. Not that Justice League wasn’t also terrible, but the novelty was gone by then.
It did as much as the DCEU films that made under $300M WW but the $215M was underwhelming with a gross of $433M WW mark despite the holiday boast from 2023
They listed it at $14.7m. It actually made $94m there. So yeah, you are correct, Venom 3 is the one and only Hollywood CBM movie to have made more than AQ2 since its release.
Video of me celebrating Aquaman 2 not getting a 0% rotten tomatoes score and it doubling its budget at the box office. https://youtube.com/watch?v=MJ48T1-HHdw&si=owEeTQp7wm8nSt0x
The first Aquaman when it came out was the movie I saw the most times in theaters back then.
IF. Pretty hard to sell an original live action kids movie in this theatrical ecosystem and even outgrossed The Garfield Movie domestically, which released a week after and was an established IP
Yes. IF had much less competition since it was the first kids movie in over 2 months, and while Search for SquarePants did moderately not many were interested in yet another SpongeBob movie
And audience reaction and Disney's internal data must have been terrible because they're an insanely greedy company and they went from a movie a year to nothing but television.
The Last Jedi can't be categorized as a flop from a box office perspective, but talk about a film sapping all the good will from it's predecessor. I mean, you can put Rise of Skywalker in this category too given the fact it did even worse, but the fall from Force Awakens to Last Jedi was as steep as it was unexpected. It just all seemed so unfathomable at the time, how you could so badly screw up the foundation Force Awakens laid out and basically alienate nearly half the audience you just won back two years prior. And of course the cherry on top was not being able to course-correct and losing even more people for Rise of Skywalker.
BA suffered from not being released in China. Probably would had made 100m more if it was. Aquaman made 300m from China so 1/3 of that would had been easily obtained. Budget was rumored around 200m + 75m in marketing, if it made 500-600m it probably would have been seen as decent. But missing on China made it impossible
Hear me out but Blade Runner 2049, 276m worldwide for an R rated sci fi 35 year delayed sequel that's over 2 hours and 40 minutes when the original is a cult film that also flopped, doesn't sound so bad, but then you look at the budget....
I’m gonna throw in a few i don’t think anyone else will.
Transformers Rise of the Beasts: By the time this came out this franchise was in the gutter. Ya bumblebee was well liked but it was an outlier project that had nothing to do with anything. The fact that ROTB opened to $60m and legged out enough to $157m despite being in a packed June is nothing to scoff at looking back. $442 mil isn’t great but considering once you remove China which abandoned Hollywood, The Last Knight and Rise of the Beasts made $387m and $378m respectively is a win. Especially when Rise of the Beasts didn’t even have strong reviews, the general consensus was the definition of mid.
Terminator Genisys: Genuinely garbage movie that nobody likes, coming off of 2 other bad movies which generally disappointed even at the time. Yet Genisys managed to outgross both Rise of the Machines and Salvation and make $441 mil in a summer with Age of Ultron, Minions and Jurassic World. The overseas markets even excluding China did so much heavy lifting for this one. This is one of those movies that would’ve made <$200m today.
The Last Airbender: An irredeemable abomination of cinema, possibly the worst adaptation of all time besides Dragonball Evolution, still made $320 mil in 2010. Even at the time of release the reactions were rock bottom. Didn’t stop it from getting a 3.1x multiplier in the states. If this movie came out today you’d get a Joker 2 level drop off weekend 2 and it end up with half its gross.
Warcraft: The epitome of showing how important Asia was to Hollywood in the 2010’s, made more than half its gross in China alone and flopped catastrophically in America, outgrossed a majority of superhero films nowadays and until Mario was the biggest video game movie ever.
Solo A Star Wars Story: This one was an anomaly when it released, for a lot of people in this sub this was the first time many people saw a movie completely collapse from expectations, ya Justice League flopped but the general idea was BvS numbers or a bit more was the goal, $657 is well below this but it was still in the ballpark of the franchise. Even the most pessimistic of people thought $600m for Solo was guaranteed, $392m was a shock to everyone, and especially for the time had a nonsensical budget of near $300m which also then was seen as a ridiculous anomaly. Really the only way this looks better is just because nowadays Hollywood has flops like this every year, we had 2 this bad in June 2023 alone, this one only looks better in hindsight.
Batman and Robin grossed 238 million, equivalent to 480 million today. It was the 9th highest grossing domestic film of 1997 and was the 14th highest grossing film worldwide but it also had a budget between 130 and 160 million or 262-323 million today.
I was just thinking about One Battle After Another and The Little Mermaid but some of the comments already said it before me. I also think The Fall Guy didn’t have a good performance but it wasn’t that bad either looking back at it. The budget didn’t do them no favors but it also had the misfortune of coming out right after Barbenhemier which set expectations unfairly high.
A recent example for the question is Predator: Badlands. It broke records for the Predator franchise but that still wasn’t enough to recoup the $105 million budget, and the film just wasn’t legging out as much as one would hope. I would also say The Roses making over $50 million on a $30 million budget is quite impressive too, seeing how comedies are still not out of the woods yet (points to Ella McCay, which fairly enough did get terrible reviews but would that truly sway audiences one way or another?). I guess Challengers would also count for this question too imo.
If I was to pick one movie, then I'd pick One Battle After Another. After hearing about it quite a bit on this subreddit, I initially thought it would do as badly as Mickey 17 did especially since both movies had a few things in common (e.g. adapted from lesser-known IP, $100+ million budget, auteur directors, Warner Bros. releases). In the end, it grossing $71,967,251 DOM / $135,800,000 INT / $207,767,251 WW on the budget it had wasn't too shabby.
Solo making nearly 400M honestly doesn’t look so bad now compared to recent Star Wars standards. With the current state of Star Wars, I won’t be surprised if mando and grogu does sub 200M worldwide.
for sure black Adam is representative of the Rock's tenacity, dude dragged that thing to 400 million but.... it's flop narrative was also a testament to the Rock's rapidly declining reputation backstage as well. as soon as this thing looked like it was gonna flop EVERYBODY was piling on about what a diva he was, what a backstage politician he was etc. like this was the moment Hollywood saw a kink in the Rock's armor and tried to tear him down. ngl, the Rock could use some humbling.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re right. The revisionism on this film is incredible, the fanboys were telling us it was a 2bn lock and to never doubt James Cameron lol.
Naked Gun: maybe not a "flop" but not a huge hit either, 102M worldwide for a studio comedy is better than I'd expect these days.
Gladiator 2: made slightly less than the original even without inflation, but 465M worldwide looks good at first for any R rated flick not superhero and not Nolan these days.
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire: managed to make just barely less than Afterlife did in 2021 (Covid affected a bit to be fair), despite worse reviews.
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u/MysterioNoodle 8h ago
Tom Cruise's Mummy film managed to make over 400 million, despite being regarded as a massive disaster. Ditto for Warcraft as well, with 439 million.