Wednesday, January 22, 2014

The eight biggest box office failures

Something called Wall St. Cheatsheet ran a list of the eight biggest money-losing movies. I never heard of most of them. Movies that cost a fortune to produce and some grossed quite a bit at the box office but had no chance of making back their massive investment:

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/the-8-biggest-film-box-office-disasters-of-all-time.html/?ref=tbla

Ron Howard's production of The Alamo came in second place. Adjusting for inflation, it lost only half a million dollars less than Cutthroat Island. It had a total cost of $145 million. Ron Howard was going to direct, but he wanted to spend $200 million on it and they wouldn't give it to him. They made it for less than half that, then spent millions more on distribution. Maybe if they had spent that extra hundred million dollars it would have been a smashing success but I can't imagine it.

The "martyrs" of the Alamo were fighting mainly for slavery. You already knew how the thing was going to end. John Wayne directed a version in 1960 and it was a massive failure.

Looking at imdb.com, there were a lot of Texans who loved the movie and thought they were being persecuted because nobody else liked it. There is a political component to it. Texas is now full of idiot secessionists, some of them criminal scum, some of them Tea Baggers. You can't take the movie completely out of that context.

Others on the list included a $122 million romantic comedy.

Of course, there's plenty of low budget failure. People spend $25 thousand making a movie which ends up being shown at a few film festivals and then disappears having been seen by no more that a hundred people.


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