The 10 Worst Box Office Bombs of the Last 10 Years

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The very words used to describe financial failures in the movie business — dud, disaster, bomb — speak to how they are perceived. These movies are not just bad. They are destructive, leaving untold collateral damage in their wake.

Of course, some box-office flops are are actually fantastic movies. Creative success and financially success are not mutually exclusive concepts. But Hollywood studios don’t particularly care about creative success. They care about how much red and black ink they’ve got in their quarterly earnings reports. Give them the choice between a masterpiece that makes no money or an artistic abomination that grosses $1 billion, and they’d all pick the latter 10 times out off 10.

The studios involved in the ten films listed below, for example, could not be happy with any of these titles, even though most of them have their defenders. These are ten of the biggest box-office bombs of the last 10 years, the ones that had the most negative impact on their owners’ bottom lines.

Bear in mind, Hollywood accounting is about as easy to understand as the mechanics of time travel in Tenet. No one outside the studios knows precisely what these films cost or what they lost. But based on publicly available information, all ten of these movies were major disappointments. They’re listed in descending order of their worldwide box office total, although that does not mean that the tenth film lost more money than the first. After all, a movie that grossed $200 million could lose way more than a movie that grossed $100 million if the $200 million movie cost more to make.