Six reasons why movies flop (2024)

It’s one of the many strange things about Hollywood: a huge movie flop can be almost as big a news story as a box-office hit.

Only recently both director Tom Hooper’s movie adaptation of Cats and Robert Downey Jr.’s much anticipated turn in Dolittle hit the headlines for bombing at the box office, creating acres of media coverage in the process.

Flop is, of course, a relative term. Some movies are labelled flops because they fail to make as much money at the box office as they cost to produce and release. A film that cost £100 million to make might cost as much again to market – and then there is the money that the cinemas take for showing the film that doesn’t go to the studio, to take into account.

Other films are sometimes called flops when they seriously underperform expectations, perhaps failing to be successful enough to launch a new movie franchise.

But why do some big movies miss the mark so widely? Film journalist Adam Smith gave us his thoughts on some of the reasons why movies bomb at the box office.

It might seem obvious, but a good title is a big help to a movie’s chances at the box-office. A good title needs to explain as much about the film as it can, so that the audience it’s intended for at least knows it’s something they might like. Think of Star Wars, Love Actually or Halloween. Obviously that’s a sci-fi movie, a romantic film and a horror movie.

But, inexplicably, Hollywood sometimes messes up this basic first step. Take John Carter. It was a mega-budgeted adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ story A Princess of Mars (one of his John Carter of Mars series of stories). It’s an action filled tale about an ordinary American who finds himself transported to an exotic alien world attempting to rescue the titular interplanetary royalty.

But the studio renamed the movie. The result was a film title with little immediate appeal, and one which didn’t communicate that the film was an action-packed, swashbuckling space adventure. Despite some good reviews, the film was a big disappointment at the box office.

Even though it’s not quite as much the case as it was 20 years ago, big stars can certainly still sell tickets. But even a huge celebrity will fail to draw in an audience, or can actually drive them away, if they’re cast in a film as a kind of character that people don’t expect from them.

Take Bruce Willis. In the 1980s and 90s, with the Die Hard films, he was one of the biggest action stars in Hollywood. But when he was cast in literary adaptation The Bonfire Of The Vanities (1990), his fans stayed away. They were used to seeing him as a wisecracking action hero, not a shady, drunken journalist.

Or there’s Robert Downey Jr., who is one of the most popular stars in modern cinema. His Iron Man and Avengers movies have been some of the most financially successful of recent times, but Dolittle (2020), in which he played an eccentric doctor who chatted with animals, didn't quite perform as well.

You can see why Hollywood studios try to ‘reboot’ franchises or remake successful old movies so often. Audiences have already proved they loved the films in the past, so it makes sense to think they’re a good bet.

But in fact reboots seem to flop just as frequently as original movies, if not more often.

Take the Terminator films. The first two movies, The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) were smash hits, and became beloved classics. But successive attempts to revive the franchise have failed. Most recently Terminator Genisys in 2015 and then Terminator: Dark Fate in 2019, which even brought back stars Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both failed to attract audiences, who were tired with the idea.

And Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was a sequel to one of the most highly regarded science fiction films of all time, 1982’s Blade Runner. But it too flopped.

It’s difficult to tell which reboots will fail and which will succeed. But a reboot has to both give older audiences what they expect from a beloved film, and offer something new and exciting for younger audiences, who might not know much about the original film at all, as well. It’s a difficult balancing act to pull off.

When we talk about press coverage for films most people immediately think of reviews. Interestingly though, a film can be a hit despite being savaged by critics. Bad reviews are more likely to hurt a smaller film that audiences don't know much about and so have only the critics’ opinions to go on.

But other kinds of bad press, usually before a movie is even released, can seriously damage its box-office chances. Cats is a good example. When the trailer for the film came out people were shocked by the CGI rendition of the characters that director Tom Hooper had chosen. It became a huge story, particularly on the internet, and when the film finally came out the film had to fight against a tidal wave of negative media coverage.

Marketing a movie is as important, and often as creative as writing the script or actually filming it. Indeed, these days a studio’s marketing department is often involved in a film’s development right from the very start.

But that doesn’t mean that sometimes they get it disastrously wrong. Possibly the most damaging marketing mistake is to raise false expectations in the audience, selling a movie as one kind of film, when it fact it’s another. Confronted with a quirky or unusual film, studios sometimes try to market it as a conventional genre film.

A good example is The Cable Guy (1990). Jim Carrey was one of the biggest comedy stars of all time but the The Cable Guy, about an obsessive cable TV repairman, was a much darker story than audiences were used to. But nevertheless the trailer represented the film as a standard zany, lighthearted, Carrey fare. Fans who did turn up when the film opened were disappointed, even angry, and told their friends to stay away - although the film did go on to make $60 million in the US alone.

The more a film costs to make (and market), the more it has to make to avoid flopping at the box office. Film studios are making fewer and fewer movies as the years go by, but they tend to cost much more over time, so perhaps it’s not surprising that there seem to be more and more flops.

Take The Mummy. This 2017 blockbuster starring Tom Cruise was meant to establish a whole series of films based on the Universal monsters of the 1930s. But with a budget estimated at between $125 and $195 million, its American box-office takings of $80 million nowhere near covered its costs. Even though it did better overseas, it seemed the idea of a Dark Universe was over before it had begun.

But this year the studio tried again with director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which had a budget of just $7 million and made $28 million just on its opening weekend.

Sometimes smaller is better – or at least less likely to flop.