I know that Mariah Carey’s Glitter, only did 2 million and that Howard the Duck was one of the biggest flops too. I wanna know the biggest flop ever. I’ve never heard of a movie only grossing like $100, 000. Has this ever happened?
According to The Box Office Guru, a movie called Far Out Man made only $82,000.
Even worse:
It’s Pat, a SNL spin off, grossed $60,822 at 33 theaters.
Worse yet, I’ve seen “It’s Pat” on Showtime and actually didn’t mind it. Does that make me sub-human?
That makes me kinda sad. Never seen the movie, but the skit was a hoot. The average movie ticket goes for about, $8? $60,000, that’s depressing.
I rented it for 1.00 and it is a decent movie. It is more like a TV Type Movie but there have been a lot worse movies. Anybody think Pluto Nash?? Xanadu?? Can’t Stop the Music??
It’s Pat is one of the greatest movies of all time.
The “Fantastic Four” movie might be considered to be the lowest grossing movie ever, but then again it was never even officially released. Even on video.
Wow, man. I bought a copy of that on VHS. IIRC, it wasn’t that great, man. You really wanted it to be greet, man, for Chong, but it just really wasn’t that great, man.
For completists only.
Hey, I liked Howard the Duck.
Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labours Lost made less than a million. I don’t think it was well reviewed. Does anybody even remember it? And Tim Burton’s Ed Wood–one of my all-time favorites–made a only a few mil., even after Martin Landau won a supporting actor award.
I think I’ve got everyone beat (except for the Fantastic Four Fiasco).
Dad Savage. Despite the prescence of Patrick Stewart, I read in Empire IIRC that the UK gross was £76 ($125 or thereabouts). That’s talent.
The question is asking two different questions. What movie made the least gross is not at all the same as the biggest flop. Biggest flop would belong to something like Ishtar, Heavens Gate, WaterWorld, i.e. a movie that cost an enormous amount to make and made very very little of it back. I mean geez, how much did Pat actually cost to make, who cares if it only grossed 62K (and by the way those movies are intended for video market also where it seems to be doing OK judging from the responses on this thread).
I actually saw both Xanadu and Howard the Duck in theaters when I was a kid. Do I get some sort of prize?
I’m trying to forget it. Why did they make it into a musical? Oh the horror!
I gotcha beat – I have friends who worked on Howard the Duck and I had to see it many times. One of the reasons it was considered a huge flop though was because, at the time, it had an unprecendentedly high budget that then ballooned up and went significantly over budget.
(However, they’ve taken some comfort thinking of it as a “research and development” project – they developed some incredible robotics technology for the duck that was later used in more profitable movies and TV shows.)
The “greatest flop” would be as Muttrox said the one that also cost the most. There are hundreds of films made every year that aren’t ever even picked up by distributors so they have a one and only screening at a film festival and never even make it to video. You just never hear about those ones.
Two horrible movies are Carver’s Gate and Silverman. They barely saw the light of day Carver’s Gate showed in ONE theatre (that I know of) and only for one week, and the title was even mispelled on the theatre’s marquee. Silverman somehow got picked up by a video distributor, even though after its premiere, my friend went out with one of the producers who called it “the worst pice of crap he’d ever seen” and the lead actor was horribly embarassed by it.
Those are but two examples – many, many more movies are produced each year and then vanish or end up being released obscurely overseas (like a film that was released only in German-speaking Switzerland and Italy).
muttrox: Heaven’s Gate is proof that even a beautiful, wonderful film can be a “flop” at the box office.
I’m not sure I agree with your definition though. I was going to post something earlier about how the B.O. gross must be related to the cost of making the film in order to get an accurate picture of “the biggest flop”; but the OP is asking which release made the least money, not which lost the most.
The OP is asking two different questions:
- Which movie grossed least?
- Which movie biggest flop
It assumes these are the same, my point is that they are not. #1 is a question of fact, I think the answer is $0, as eats_crayons pointed out. #2 requires definitions – reasonable people can disagree, depending what criteria go into a “flop”.
Dad Savage has some promise, but I don’t recall seeing it in the theaters at all. Naturally, any movie that isnt released in theaters is going to be a low grossing movie.
I think we need some parameters to define this ‘lowest grossing hollywood movie’, most importantly, released in over X number of theaters, where X is suffiently large to classify the movie as at least tried in the theaters.
I recall some article which calculated which movie had the worse inverse relationship between production cost and ticket sales. The winner was Cutthroat Island.