Best box office disaster of the 2000s

wow why did Gigli cost that much? the effects? are there 'effects' in it? can't have been the stars' fees surely...

Oh balls, I misread the op and voted The Invasion because it's total dross. My *real* vote (ie. most fun, and most merit) easily Grindhouse, specifically Death Proof.

Choosing the worst would be more fun, but almost impossible.

It's really sad that Grindhouse did such bad business. It was a fun time at the movies, and it's too bad no one's gonna take a chance on something like that again anytime soon.

xp, i thought about that, but few people have seen these films by definition, and the worst of the worst is a special title for which voting should be taken seriously.

i assume grindhouse is going to walk this though.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash ($100m/$4m)

$20m of that budget was Eddie Murphy's wages.

Grindhouse is so dope fuk u america

I have ZERO intention of ever watching Battlefield Earth. Have any of you seen it?

If anything else but grindhouse gets even two votes, it's a fix.

I've only seen Grindhouse, so it wins by default. Did Rollerball star LLCoolJ or am I thinking of something else?

"The film features cameo appearances by Slipknot, Shane McMahon, and Pink."

well how did this fail?

Loved Grindhouse - the whole package. It flopped for the right reasons, ie it was a really long, bizarre, movie-nerd in-joke that was never going to justify $67m anyway. But when a blockbuster fails to make money, it's blown its whole raison d'etre and is just pitiful.

Is The Adventures of Pluto Nash fun-bad or just bad-bad? It looks like one of those movies on Tracey Jordan's wall in 30 Rock.

>It flopped for the right reasons, ie it was a really long, bizarre, movie-nerd in-joke that was never going to justify $67m anyway.

Which makes it doubly weird that Inglourious Basterds, about which the same could be said, has been such a hit. The capriciousness of the film going public still amazes me.

Only thing here I've seen is the last half of Catwoman. It really was bad.

And it cost 100 MIL?! What the fuck.

I mean, Grindhouse would have been just as good with those same directors spending $25mil instead of $67mil

Kind of dumb that they spent 67 million clams to make two movies that feel like ones that cost $400,000

The capriciousness of the film going public still amazes me.

Basterds had Brad Pitt. Grindhouse had Freddy Rodriguez.

I saw Battlefield Earth in the theater and it was fucking abysmal. I saw it with my girlfriend at the time and we both fell asleep... twice. We would have just left, but it was one of those 100 degree days and the air-conditioning was at least nice to nap in.

Ruddy hell, it's been a while since I actually fell asleep at the cinema. I've only seen it on TV, but concur with your opinion. It is very, very bad indeed.

hahaha, why did you see battlefied earf in the theater?

I still have no idea. It was the summer my gf and I were doing the long-distance thing and met up somewhere one day that had a shitty movie theater and it was pretty much the only thing showing we hadn't seen.

how could something like Town and Country have cost $90M? I saw about half of it on an airplane once and I somehow doubt it became a high budget action movie in the second half.

yikes, some of these costs!
film makers aren't too resourceful are they

do these costs include marketing?

I think Garry Shandling got like $30 million for that.

(xxpost)

ya i don't think there's any doubt grindhouse is gonna take this, maybe "worst" would have been a better way to go about it?

hah! I was gonna do this poll.

Being a connoisseur of quality, I saw exactly half of one of these (the Tarantino side of Grindhouse, which obv is the one whose failure I'm happiest about).

two movies that feel like ones that cost $400,000

cept of course THEY DON'T (at least Death Proof didn't)

How did Evan Almighty not make this list???

feel free to do worst, guys

how are you voting on this one, morbs?

Battleship Earth has the biggest laughs, but none of these things is remotely defensible aesthetically. The weird one is T&C – what kind of audience did Beatty think would attend this thing?

sophisticates

why would I vote on this? The only one I'd be curious in seeing is B:E.

i see

Grindhouse failed cos it didn't seem like a "real movie" to people, I dunno why anyone thought it'd work (I liked it, but), people're kinda dumb

the article is a weirdly auteurist take on demographics-based licensed products

Delightful:

Beatty dithers as a New York architect who cheats on his wife with several women; Shandling's his best pal trying to come out as gay. And then there's Charlton Heston, playing against type, as a gun nut.

favorite to least (of the six I've seen): Grindhouse, The Spirit, The Invasion, Battlefield Earth, Town & Country, Rollerball. Can recommend the first four for entertainment value, maybe even T&C which between the decrepit sex jokes and frequent crane shots I'm pretty sure was directed by Johnny LaRue.

You can tell which scenes in The Invasion were reshoots by looking at Nicole Kidman's eyes, it's weird.

ok i should have ranked BE over Invasion, though the version shown in theaters (which i saw twice!) had more John Travolta cackling than the version on video, which added more of the ostensible lead.

And it cost 100 MIL?! What the fuck.

― Communi-Bear Silo State (chap), Wednesday, December 2, 2009 1:14 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

cgi cats

i actually enjoyed land of the lost

didn't Ebert defend Gigli?

i like Planet Terror more, but I voted for Land of the Lost because I just watched that the other day and it was a perfectly nice stupid Will Ferrell movie, they just made the mistake of raising its expectations way up by basing it on an old TV show nobody really cares that much about

they made this list too early, Avatar's budget is apparently as much as 500 million.

to be fair most of that was spent on discovering an alien race and blowing up their home planet

no john travolta in p-funk klingon gear for james cameron

lol

You can tell which scenes in The Invasion were reshoots by looking at Nicole Kidman's eyes

So she's had her eyes done TOO?!

they shot a lot of The Invasion in Baltimore, one day I was downtown and got to see them doing some shooting and was like wow cool, I guess this is gonna be a big deal, then like 2 years later its release was so quiet I barely heard about it.

Do people really think the Titanic softies are going to flock to Avatar? You'd think the ad campaign would be point more towards Cameron's Terminator credentials, but they keep emphasizing Titanic.

The kids will go to Avatar if it's got Kate Winslet's hand pressing against a car window and Celine Dion singing from an iceberg.

Voting for Grindhouse since I actually enjoyed it quite legitimately (especially Planet Terror) but The Spirit has a special place in my heart, I was laughing my way through it all in the theater.

i saw BE because thats what happens to you when you have cable. it is hilariously bad, and worth watching if you are into that sort of thing.

voted grindhouse, which is going to crush all others in this poll tbh

oh yeah and also, land of the lost is really not that bad. plus hey danny mcbride

re: gigli, ebert says it doesn't work, but also:

Consider the matching monologues. They've gotten into an argument over the necessity of the penis, which she, as a lesbian, feels is an inferior device for delivering sexual pleasure. He delivers an extended lecture on the use, necessity and perfect design of the appendage. It is a rather amazing speech, the sort of thing some moviegoers are probably going to want to memorize. Then she responds. She is backlit, dressed in skintight workout clothes, doing yoga, and she continues to stretch and extend and bend and pose as she responds with her speech in praise of the vagina. When she is finished, Reader, the vagina has won, hands down. It is so rare to find dialogue of such originality and wit, so well written, that even though we know the exchange basically involves actors showing off, they do it so well, we let them.

Can someone who's seen Battlefield Earth confirm something for me? Over the course of the relatively brief bit that I saw, the camera was never once parallel with the ground plane. Everything was shot from a variety of weirdly skewed angles. Is that the case through the entire movie? Because, if so: weird.

Grindhouse is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XECBHNlAko

xp Yes B:E has a stunning amount of nauseating tilt-shots. There are some normal, level shots but they are in the minority. I guess the director felt that angled shots were more dramatic and action-filled.

I have also heard that the film is only like 1/3 of the plot in the book.

grindhouse was great

yeah the tilt shots frankly just add to the hilarity imo, because the amount of them gets just cartoonish, and as any high schooler that has done a wacky video project knows, they are the key to cinematic greatness

I have also heard that the film is only like 1/3 of the plot in the book

yeah, I remember seeing an interview with John Travolta which addresses this and him saying that there will definitely be a sequel.

Wait, is Old Dogs the sequel to BE? To the theater!!!

How could something like Town and Country have cost $90M?

Some reports have pushed it past $100 million! The entire pathetic story is laid out in James Robert Parish's Fiasco - A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops - basically, starting without a finished script, expensive rewrites/retakes (two days of shooting disappeared from a van!), and star salaries (Beatty got $8 million). Btw anyone interested in this thread should check out that book which includes a chapter on Battlefield Earth but caveat - one would think it'd make for a fun read but it's actually quite depressing seeing such gargantuan amounts of money being wasted and Hollywood folk not learning from past mistakes.

I prefer to think of Planet Terror as Death Proof's vestigial tail so I voted for Gigli which is very much defensible. Most of the rest I forgot ever existed.

fiasco is a pretty fun book.

the tilt shots frankly just add to the hilarity imo, because the amount of them gets just cartoonish, and as any high schooler that has done a wacky video project knows, they are the key to cinematic greatness

let's not forget their combined with dramatic wipes

fiasco is a pretty fun book.

Agreed, read it about a year back. So many insane stories.

they're combined, rather

god i need to watch BE again. "THE FRIENDLY BARTENDER!!!!"

in a very genuine way, we can thank quentin tarantino that it even exists

Travolta, a long-time Scientologist, had sought for many years to make a film of the novel by Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. He was unable to obtain funding from any major studio due to concerns about the film's script, prospects, and connections with Scientology. The project was eventually taken on by an independent production company, Franchise Pictures, which specialized in rescuing stars' stalled pet projects. Travolta signed on as a co-producer and contributed millions of dollars of his own money to the production, which was largely funded by a German film distribution company. Franchise Pictures was later sued by its investors and was bankrupted after it emerged that it had fraudulently overstated the film's budget by $31 million.[4]

http://pugnaciouspriest.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/forest_whitaker_battlefield_earth_001.jpg

an man-investor getting leverage on a film distribution company? THAT will be the day.

surprised that a german company got involved in something with such strong scientology connections

battlefield earth is probably the most implausible movie in history. it's IMDb "goofs" porn.

the aliens conquered earth in a matter of minutes, then spent the next millenium in Denver. Only Denver. Then, some cavemen found working fighter jets and took back the globe.

never say never

$20 million went to Travolta's accent coach.

Just another bad day at the office:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8z7-DIa1As

A sampling of all the delights on offer from the master thespian:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=208tm76O97I

oh christ! that is some of the worst shit i have ever watched.

omg you weren't kidding about the tilt shots

# An early scene of Terl (John Travolta) gleefully rescinding a promise to an unscrupulous underling in a bar/nightclub is cut from U.S. home video prints

# In the theatrical release when Terl takes Johnny to the library he tells him that he is sure to find plenty of recipies for raw rat. This has been removed from the US video release.

# In a scene shown in the theatrical version but cut from the video/DVD release, Terl and Ker stand before a chasm with river below. They wonder whether humans can fly or not, and Terl drops one off the edge to see if they can. Humans can't fly, and the man falls screaming into the depths.

# In the nightclub scene with Ms. Terl she promises that Terl will be "as happy as a baby Psychlo on a steady diet of kerbango". In the theatrical release the line she delivered was differently phrased and ended in "as happy as a baby in a crib full of Kerbango."

while grindhouse is far and away the best movie on this list, battlefield really is the "best box office disaster."

Battlefield Earth is one of the best so-bad-it's-good movies.

I watched Gigli in the theater on opening weekend Saturday at 8pm and my friend and I were the ONLY TWO PEOPLE THERE.

so where do we get the theatrical cut of B:E?

Hell. Or whatever planet Scientologists are from.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I thought Grindhouse was terrific, and am still really bummed that we never got a sequel with two new genres.

I'm sure we will if Q wins another Oscar for his comic-book Nazi horseshit.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol

jesus

Surprised it was that close tbh.

IMDB Trivia for
Gigli (2003)
* Received such bad reviews that it was dropped by every UK cinema after only one week.

-

wtf...

Which makes it doubly weird that Inglourious Basterds, about which the same could be said, has been such a hit. The capriciousness of the film going public still amazes me.

Americans, to their credit, absolutely love movies where Nazis get killed.

Being unable to get people to pay to see a movie that has Ben Affleck AND Jennifer Lopez AND Al Pacino AND Christopher Walken is pretty impressive. I mean $6 mil box office means, what, four or five hundred thousand people saw it?

^two non-actors and two corpses^

IMDB Trivia for

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

In absolute terms, this movie made the largest financial loss of any movie to date, with a budget of $100 million and a total US gross of $4.41 million (total loss, $95.59 million).

But the quality!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7XN1nmrk3k

This appears to make even less sense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMhUDOMIuDw

Watching Town & Country on Netflix. Kind of C-grade Nancy Meyers.

Diane Keaton's got verve, though.

The Spirit was pretty good, imo!- but then I took it as extremely tongue-in-cheek in-joke the whole way through.