I was looking up the Cat in the Hat movie on IMDB. I was amazed that it pulled over $100 million. The movie was so awful. I caught about 8 minutes on TV the other day. I could not watch any more.
On IMDB the movie has a rating of 3.3 which is close to the bottom 100.
What is the lowest rated box office smash? Or the biggest box office smash with the worst rating? As you can see, I do not know how to word this.
A lot depends on your definition of “smash” and your definition of “low rated.”
Using this link as a guide…
“Grease” certainly qualifies as a smash, and as I recall from my high school days, the reviews ranged from mediocre to poor.
“Smokey and the Bandit” was also a blockbuster, adjusted for inflation, and reviews were generally awful.
Well, Cat in the Hat didn’t even break even, so $100M notwithstanding, I don’t think you can call it a b.o. smash.
**You Got Served**, however, cost $8M to make and grossed $40M, so despite rating a 2.3 on IMDB, it did make its money back 5 times over.
In that first post, I limited myself to movies that raked in HUGE revenues, and icked out the two that got the worst reviews.
If you want to go the other way and ask, “What movie with universally bad reviews made the most money,” well… you might want to look at low-budget horror films. Most get panned by all the critics, but many go on to make surprisingly big bucks.
Well, I didn’t check all 100, but I did check the most likely suspects to get low scores (again, on IMDB), and the 3 lowest I found were:
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (5.6)
Jurassic Park: The Lost World (5.8)
Twister (6.0)
Grease has a rating of 6.9 on IMDB. I am more interested in movie goers ratings rather than what the critics say.
Smokey and the Bandit has a rating of 6.5.
As for Box office smash I will say taking over $100 million at the US box office.
Cat in the Hat seems to be the winner of this razzie type award.
I don’t particularly care for your definition of low-rated, if you’re using the IMDB ratings as a guide. I’m not convinced that people who bother to post ratings there constitute a random sampling of the population.
And I don’t regard “Cat in the Hat” as a smash hit, either. $100,000,000 is a fortune to you and me, but I’m betting the producers were disappointed with the take.
Look, if the average movie price today is $8 or so (more in many markets), a mere 12 or 13 million people (out of a population of 300 million) can put it over the 100 million dollar mark. That was a huge number when, say, “Star Wars” first came out, but it isn’t any more.
That’s something I have to point out to cultural conservatives who think it’s a sad reflection on our society when some torture-porn flick is the #1 movie at the box office in October (I try to tell them, all that means is a few million bored teenagers wanted to see a scary movie at Halloween time, and that one happened to be showing).
Porky’s.
Your thread, your rules.
Ace Ventura When Nature Calls has a 5.4 IMDB User Rating and made $108Mil. domestically $212M worldwide
Batman Forever has an Identical IMDB rating but made$184Mil domestically. I wonder if the fan boys messed the IMDB rating up tho which is why it is not as clean as Ace II
Batman and Robin made over $100M but only has a 3.5 on IMDB.