Kong hasn’t even made a profit yet. It will, eventually, via home video. But its major moneymaking run was a vast disappointment.
Vast.
But it was a given in the minds of Universal Studios that it would be the highest-grossing film released in 2005. It was fifth.
It was a given in the minds of Universal Studios that it would dominate the holiday season. Narnia blew it away, to the tune of $155 million.
Domestically, it made $217 million. Peter Jackson got 20% of that as part of his back-end deal. Meaning that, of the domestic gross of $217 million, only $174 didn’t go directly to him. Meaning the movie missed making back it’s production budget domestically by $33 million, right there.
So? Kong made $545 million worldwide!
… of which Jackson got 20%, leaving $436, minus the production budget of $207 = $229 million.
We don’t know how high the worldwide marketing budget was for Kong, but we can guess, and the generally-accepted estimate is $100 million.
To quote from Wikipedia:
So, it may not have been a bomb, but it was most certainly a flop and I think it fits just fine in this thread. Trust me when I tell you that within the halls of a certain studio, there was tremendous disappointment. They were hoping (admittedly, very foolishly) for a billion dollars in box office, not a movie that shows no sign of breaking even before video.
The kinda sad, kinda ironic thing about Mystery Men is that it would probably do five times as well now as it did when it was originally released. Ah well, them’s the breaks.
Wiki say “Unfortunately for George Lucas, the film got spectacularly bad reviews and equally bad box office performance. This may have been due to the previews, which were badly designed and vague.”
The movie was rewritten about five million times; it just careened from pillar to post and by the time they put it in the can I think they’d forgotten the point.
I was surprised it bombed because Arnold Schwartzenegger was in it. To be honest I thought it was bad; it did have some good self-referential jokes but it didn’t go quite far enough in that regard, and had a bit of a schizophrenic feel to it. Nonetheless, at the time I would have bet big money it was going to succeed anyway, because at that time Schwartzenegger was an unstoppable box office force. Or, so it seemed.
I’m not sure if we’re discussing movies we’re surprised bombed, or we just are disappointed they bombed. I can’t imagine why anyone would think “Serenity” would do well; it was a reasonably decent movie and all, but it was also based on a TV show that got cancelled for bad ratings (and hadn’t had years to percolate in syndication like Star Trek) had no known names in it, and wasn’t marketed very well. It didn’t even have a good title. It had very little chance of being a big hit.
I watched that movie as a kid, and remember loving it. The pipe organ scene is one that has always stuck with me as one of the trippiest things ever put to film. Unfortunately, whenever I describe it to someone and they express interest in seeing it, I’m at a loss to tell them where to find it. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been released on DVD. Now I need to go see if I can track down a VHS copy…
Amazon
I was exposed to Sam in my late teens (A Pen Warmed-Up in Hell), the Adam and Eve sequence always makes me laugh, and in the end cry, for me it’s the real Mark Twain.
I think one big reason for the Powerpuff flop was that opened two weeks after Lilo and Stitch. Most parents had already schlepped the kids to the movies and were unwilling to pay another ~50 dollars to do it again for a while.
In my opinion, the movie also marks the point where the whole thing began to slide. PPG worked best as a show about little girls who happen to be superheroes, not superheroes who happen to be little girls. The movie was mostly action sequences, with no real attempt to differentiate the girls’ characters until they were sitting on the asteroid almost at the end of the movie. That’s not a good thing to show reviewers who’ve never seen one episode of your TV show. The reviews panned it for assuming too much from the show.
Want another cartoon movie that died for no good reason other than a bad advertising campaign? The Iron Giant. Even after Bird did The Incredibles, it’s still unknown to the masses.
$50? For a movie? Even assuming an $8 full price ticket that’s enough money for both parents and four kids. And I know when I was a kid a nighttime movie was a huge treat. It was almost always a matinee.
But The Iron Giant is easy. It was too adult for an animated movie.
But IMDB says it made $80 million worldwide. While not great that doesn’t sound terrible.
:smack: D’oh. And I meant to add that I, Robot wasn’t as bad as I figured it would be. I’ve got several friends who swear by Death to Smoochy, but I think that one deserved the reaction it got.
I’m glad to see Willow getting some mentions here. I grew up with it, so I’m not exactly unbiased, but man, I LOVED that movie!
Val Kilmer’s “Mad” Martigan was my favorite! And General Kael (the dude in black armor, with the skull-shaped face-piece on his helmet) was totally awesome. There were good swordfights, lots of good comic-relief scenes, I really feel that it’s one of the best fantasy movies ever made. I mean come on, it was based on a story George Lucas wrote, and he produced it (the two things he does best). Ron freaking Howard co-produced and, more importantly, directed it. How could it not be great?
It had some good quotes, too.
“I am the greatest swordsman that ever lived.” -“Mad” Martigan; just like that, said as a matter of fact. Or how about the scene between Martigan and Sorsha when they’re riding to Tir Aslien;
“I guess it went away,”
“Went away? You worship me, I am your moon, your sun, and it went away?!”
“I guess,”
then she hits him and escapes… classic!
And personally I was surprised by Enemy at the Gates. The audience I saw it with ate it up, but it poofed into the unknown within days.
Also I would add Destiny Turns on the Radio. I didn’t expect a hit from it, but I’ve never even seen movie geeks, cultists, or anyone else bring it up. From Dusk Till Dawn was another Tarantino produced film from around the same time and far worse, but I’ve at least heard people bring it up.
No, I was surprised it bombed. Most of the people I work with went to see it (and we’re talking Nurses across a 30 age range), my very blue collar brother and his girlfriend saw it, and the nerdy uni students I went with all really liked it, and none of them had seen (in most case hadn’t heard of) the TV series prior. Just based on the cross section of people I knew who enjoyed it I expected it to do fairly well on word of mouth and was surprised when it didn’t. I wasn’t expecting it do do huge numbers but to barely break even was interesting.
I am not entirely hostile to the movie. One of my favorite parts (haven’t seen it in years) is when a stand or table in the witch’s castle accidentally get zapped by a magic spell during a fight scene, and the table starts lurching around the room on its own legs.
But I think a lot of people (like me) found it rather derivative of a lot of other things we were already very familiar with. Specifically there is a lot of Tolkienesque and 1st Star Wars trilogy-like elements in it. And has been often pointed out the first Star Wars trilogy is itself derivative of a lot of other popular myths but seems to integrate and reference them more smoothly than Willow did.
