2018 Has Been A Superb Year For Big Box Office Flops
From 'Robin Hood' to 'Mortal Engines', these films did not do well.
Over the last few years, Hollywood has basically decided that movies can only be very, very expensive or very, very cheap. The middle-ground has been almost entirely obliterated: if you’re a young director moving through the system, your choices are to either make a multi-million dollar superhero movie, or to crowdfund a couple of million bucks to make your passion project.
That means that when movies succeed at the box office, they really succeed, as the last few years have made abundantly clear. After all, three of the top 15 highest grossing films of all time came out this very year: Black Panther, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and Avengers: Infinity War.
Of course, that also means that when movies crash, they do so with all the grace of a hot air balloon coated in iron.
Look, it’s never fun to revel in other people’s failures. But most of the people responsible for the year’s biggest flops are multi-millionaires who have already lined up their next projects. So, while we run through the year’s biggest cinematic disappointments, try not to feel too sorry for them, ‘kay?
Mortal Engines
What It Cost: $100 million USD
How Much It Made: $40 million USD
How mortal those engines turned out to be.
A late entry to the canon of 2018’s most resounding cinematic flops, Mortal Engines opened to an absolutely disastrous $7.5 million when it opened in America. Variety have already tried to guess why: they reckon the relative obscurity of the Mortal Engines book series in the States, not to mention the complexity of the plot (it’s only just clear from the trailer that the film is about giant mobile cities eating each other), both hurt the film’s chances of real success.
But surely some of the blame should also go to the absolute baffling marketing campaign, which tried to play up the semi-involvement of Peter Jackson, who decided to skip out on directing the thing because he was too busy thinking about The Hobbit still, and also couldn’t really be bothered.
Robin Hood
What It Cost: $100 million USD
How Much It Made: $75 million USD
Even Taron Edgerton was no match for Disney’s sexy fox Robin Hood.
I know a $75 million box office haul doesn’t sound too bad, but here’s the thing: big budget movies need to make pretty much double their budget to cover both marketing costs, and the chunk of box office receipts that cinemas take. That means Robin Hood, the year’s least necessary movie, lost somewhere around $125 million.
Tbh, I’m still not entirely sure this movie exists, and I’ve seen the damn thing. None of it makes an impact, from the dull casting, to the forgettable action sequences, to the weird as hell sorta-modern/sorta-throwback costume design. And anyway, everybody knows the only Robin Hood we need is the hot fox one.
The Girl In The Spider’s Web
What It Cost: $43 million USD
How Much It Made: $31 million USD
Noomi Rapace walked so Claire Foy might run.
Okay, so the failure of this one is kind baffling. For a start, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander series is exceedingly popular even to this day: his original trilogy has sold a staggering 80 million copies, all told. Moreover, it’s not like the series is dead, even despite Larsson’s passing back in 2004. New Sander books are coming out, and they’re doing pretty well — the latest, The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye dropped last year to reasonably positive reviews.
For those reasons, it made a lotta sense for Columbia and MGM to drop a (relatively modest) $43 million on a new Sander movie. But cinemagoers are a cruel mistress, and they firmly rejected the flick, leaving chances for a sequel as dead as any misogynist who gets in Lisbeth’s way.
The Sisters Brothers
What It Cost: $38 million USD
How Much It Made: $9 million USD
Pictured: Joaquin Phoenix responding to The Sisters Brothers box office gross.
Proof, if ever it was needed, that star power can’t buy you box office receipts, the dark comedy/Western The Sisters Brothers went down about as well as a dark stranger stumbling into a saloon. No matter that the film starred everyone from Jake Gyllenhaal to Joaquin Phoenix, it sank like a lead balloon at the U.S. box office, scoring a meagre $3 million in the states.
For the record, that probably means it’ll never get a cinematic Australian release — not that we were ever going to get the film in a timely manner anyway, thanks to our thoroughly broken distribution system!