Greatest Box-Office Bombs, Disasters and Film Flops:

Films have the potential to skyrocket the profits of a studio, or to send it into ruins and bankruptcy. Films that cost more to make than they acquire in revenue (both domestic and worldwide) are considered box-office catastrophes or bombs. Studios split grosses with theater owners, so even if a movie makes as much as its production budget, it's still losing, and that's before even considering marketing costs. A film often must make almost double its budget to become profitable. Most big box-office bombs are summer blockbusters which are enormously expensive and face stiff competition.

There are many reasons for a film to "bomb" at the box-office - the major causes are lack of studio promotion, heavy competition from other movies released at the same time, exorbitant production costs difficult to recoup and other production problems, negative word of mouth (especially in the era of the Internet and social media) or critical reviews, and other external factors such as bad timing or economic problems in society at large.

Movie audiences often love to relish the fact that some films, such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), Cutthroat Island (1995) or Heaven's Gate (1980) turn out to be monumental flops (which bankrupted their studios), and are fascinated by the details of why certain directors/actors and their films fail. Sometimes an actor's or director's career suffers, sometimes not. Most A-list directors and actors have suffered through at least one major flop, including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee and Brian DePalma, to name just a few.

Some films are unjustly labeled flops, such as Cleopatra (1963) and Waterworld (1995), although both are included in the descriptions. In recent years, some of these low-income producing films have become profitable (after initial box-office failures) with strong international grosses, and further profits from the sales of movies to TV syndication and to home video/DVD releases (or re-releases). A prominent example of a film which did very poorly in the US, (i.e., The Golden Compass (2007)) with only $70.1 million (domestic revenue), easily recouped its production budget costs of $180 million with $302 million (foreign only revenue) - for a total of $372 million (worldwide).

This kind of comeback has been particularly true for films in the cult films genre, such as Spielberg's 1941 (1979), or action films with a big name star, such as Last Action Hero (1993), Batman & Robin (1997) or Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), or larger epics such as Alexander (2004) or Poseidon (2006).

Bombs vs. Turkeys: This selection of box-office financial bombs is often significantly different from another category of films, known as "turkeys" -- or in other words, films which have been rated as the worst ever made. These clunkers have often received official Golden Raspberry Awards (or "Razzies") which were first awarded in 1981 (for films made in 1980), although some "turkeys" are included in this list (such as Showgirls (1995) and Basic Instinct 2 (2006)). The Razzie Awards were loosely based on the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards written by film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry Medved. Many of the 'turkeys' were also described in Harry Medved's earlier 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All-Time. In 1984, the Medveds also wrote The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History -- detailing the biggest financial film disasters in Hollywood history up to that time.