Audience Alienating Premise / Film

Some films are able to attract multiple demographics. These films, on the other hand, tend to attract a very small demographic.

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Genres

• Almost every movie set during the Iraq War has been a Box Office Bomb, including The Kingdom, Green Zone, and In the Valley of Elah. The war itself is so politically charged (the most controversial case since The Vietnam War) that any depiction of it risks alienating large chunks of the audience based on its perceived politics, and it's too current to work as a Period Piece. An alternative explanation is that the problem is with films perceived as critical of the military, or as depicting typical soldiers as victims and/or war criminals. The one successful Iraq War movie, American Sniper, focused on a specific, real life soldier and thus was distant enough of those pitfalls, and even then, the film was controversial due to the supposed sanitization of Chris Kyle, who some felt was a war criminal. Act of Valor managed to make money, and that started life as a Navy SEAL recruitment film (and the jingoistic tone was hated by critics but certainly worked for the viewers). Zero Dark Thirty, by the same team of The Hurt Locker, also recouped its budget given it dealt with the hunt everyone wanted to be solved. (ZDT, along with Lone Survivor, also shows how Afghanistan is less contentious for audiences than Iraq and thus easier to sell).
• Fictional movies where the central themes and characters are LGBTQ+ can be a hard sell for mainstream audiences, especially outside of the United States and Europe. The Queer Show Ghetto is stronger (especially outside the aforementioned region where LGBTQ+ acceptance isn't as mainstream) than most other "Ghetto" tropes because not only will most straight people think such a movie isn't for them, but if it's about one specific queer subset—say, a lesbian period drama—then the other queer subsets might think the movie isn't for them either. And it's difficult to appeal to every group without coming across as pandering a Theme Park Version of queer culture. While Love, Simon was a major success, much of that was due to Yaoi Fangirls turning out in huge numbers. The majority of LGBTQ+ films are independent releases that have more creative freedom due to the smaller budget being easier to recoup.
• Hollywood and Professional Wrestling tend to not mix very well, whether it be for movies directly about wrestling or a Non-Actor Vehicle featuring a wrestler. Wrestling as a medium is often recognized as being a popular, crowd-pleasing artform, but also niche and often lowbrow, which often results in "wrestling films" being pigeonholed into low-budget B-movie shlock (a not-insignificant amount of films by WWE Studios falls into such material), with the one-two punch of mainstream audiences often being disinterested in the subject matter or its non-actor stars (even when Hulk Hogan and wrestling as a whole were in their prime of mainstream relevance in the late-80s, his forays into Hollywood led to a string of critical and commercial bombs), and wrestling fans being disinterested in watching their wrestling stars degrade themselves in a shallow attempt to imitate Hollywood as opposed to their strengths in the ring. While wrestling in films can be done justice (The Wrestler saw Darren Aronofsky making a critically and commercially successful character drama positively drenched in wrestling culture), and some wrestlers have been able to become successful actors (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, John Cena, and Batista have seen plenty of success as action stars, while the likes of Roddy Piper, Kevin Nash, and André the Giant carved out a spot in various Cult Classic films), often their success is built simply off their own terms — committed endeavors by wrestling promotions to create "the next Hollywood star" tend to be widely panned across the board, with attempting to act and wrestle at the same time usually being a recipe for disappointment.

Studios

• Sony Pictures is infamous for producing and releasing films with off-putting premises that are quite often critically reviled on release, generate controversy pre-release and bomb as a result of said controversy, especially after 2014:
  • While Happy Madison Productions' films tend to attract audiences, they've also made a few that appeal to no one:
    • Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star promised viewers the story of a masturbating Manchild with a tiny penis attempting to become a porn star. It turned out the audience of people interested in seeing a buck-toothed man in a sweater vest repeatedly pleasure himself was very small indeed, and the film made less than a third of its budget back, on top of being critically savaged.
    • That's My Boy is about the survivor of statutory rape at the hands of a middle school teacher and parental abuse at the hands of his father. Decades later, he's an unemployed alcoholic, and he hasn't spoken to his now-adult son of said rape in years. It's a comedy starring Adam Sandler. Critics, and much of the potential audience, found the setup far too serious to be funny, and it never recouped its budget.
    • Pixels combines the studio's usual low-brow comedy with a sci-fi action approach, featuring an Alien Invasion that copies 1980s video games. Gamers - plus older audiences in general - wouldn't like the low-effort jokes or how the movie depict them as losers, and younger people who could like this type of humor won't get the nostalgic references. Hence it failed at the box office, and marked Happy Madison's last theatrical release, as the studio has since retreated to Netflix exclusives.
  • Ghostbusters (2016) became infamous for this. The fact that it was a Continuity Reboot with an all-female cast who unceremoniously replaced the originals rather than a continuation of the first two films did not sit well with the Ghostbusters fanbase, which wasn't helped by the fact that a planned Ghostbusters 3 was reportedly cancelled in favour of greenlighting this movie or that die-hard fans had been on-again-off-again taunted with the prospect of a proper third sequel for nearly thirty years. The fact that it came out during a very contentious election year in which one of the candidates was a woman served to heighten the discussion over this film gender-flipping the cast, as well as the underwhelming trailers and all the bad publicity caused by all the flame wars over the film's direction and cast resulted in casual moviegoers being turned off from seeing the movie as well, leading to it bombing at the box office despite a mixed to positive critical reception. It's rather telling that a major selling-point of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is that it's a direct, if distant, sequel to Ghostbusters II that goes out of its way to ignore this version.
  • Charlie's Angels (2019) was a more sincerely feminist (and more race-diverse) continuation of the original 1970s series. But it didn't pan out: The original (male) fans were alienated by the reduced sexualization and the more Anvilicious and feminist tone of the characters, while the women and the young female audience Sony was trying to market to also ignored the film as they still viewed it as "the Jiggle Show from the Seventies", and it was too dusty a property to woo the general 18-24 crowd (some of whom wouldn't have been born even when the Cameron Diaz/Drew Barrymore/Lucy Liu films were released in the early 2000s!). Not helping matters was the fact that the previous attempt at a reboot in 2011 was a notorious flop which only lasted four episodes. The result was a major Box Office Bomb.
• Disney is infamously known to have some of their animated movies suffer from this every time they try to break away from their mold: for example, because they tried to venture into Darker and Edgier territory, the disastrous box-office failure of The Black Cauldron almost destroyed the entire studio, and was quickly forgotten once The Little Mermaid (1989) was released into theaters and was proven to be far more successful. However, during the early 2000s, Disney then tried breaking away from the mold again, even revisiting the Darker and Edgier trope a second time, but this resulted in movies like Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet becoming disastrous box office failures, forcing Disney to eventually begin to end their long-running trend of animating traditionally-animated movies for good. However, these movies are still considered as cult favorites, preventing them from being completely forgotten.

Individual Films — Animated

• El Arca is an animated retelling of the story of Noah's Ark from the animals' point of view that is very questionably written: Christians who would have been interested in the film for its Biblical story were turned off by its blasphemy and raunchiness, the aforementioned sexual themes made the movie unsuitable for children when its art style and sillier scenes seemed geared for them, and most viewers (except for a few members of the Furry Fandom) were repulsed by the sexualization of animal characters. To cap it all off, a large number of furries are put off by the biblical themes. The movie seemed to have no idea who its audience was supposed to be, and consequently failed and fell into obscurity.
• Bolívar, el Héroe: For one thing, the film takes many artistic licenses with the story of Simon Bolivar, which for many people is disrespectful. For another, the poor animation and the numerous and exaggerated clichés in an attempt to make an "Animesque" adventure also alienated anime fans.
• Cesante is a Chilean adult animated film that covers 12 hours in the life of an unemployed man named Carlos Meléndez and the trials and tribulations he goes through in search of work and respect. The film premiered in 2003, at a time when Chile was going through a serious economic crisis that left many people unemployed, which for many hit too close to home. In addition, the consciously ugly and grotesque aesthetic alienated viewers who weren't used to animated films that weren't intended for family viewing.
• Although considered a Cult Classic, Felidae has difficulty finding mainstream attention in large part because of its premise. It's a Film Noir where the primary characters are feral cats. Sounds harmless enough... except the film is also full of disturbing imagery involving gruesome murder, surreal nightmares, and a realistic sex scene (again, as a reminder, the characters are non-anthropomorphic house cats). The film obviously can't be watched by children, but adults couldn't get into the film either on accounts of the characters being ordinary cats and the jarringly cartoonish art style.
• Although Fantasia is now considered a Disney classic, some have argued this was one of the reasons for its initial box office failure at the time, as a mature concert arthouse film featuring a variety of shorts that had no dialogue and widely varied in their tone and narrative had little appeal to general audiences, who found the experimental nature of the film and use of classical music to be too "avant-garde" and "formal" for their liking, while many critics and classical music nerds saw the mere idea of Fantasia as insulting and disrespectful to classical music. Despite having plans for more films at the time, the film's failure meant Disney would not try the Fantasia concept again until Fantasia 2000 nearly 60 years later... which also flopped at the box office for similar reasons (despite the original film having been Vindicated by History by then), causing Disney to abandon the Fantasia concept altogether.
• A chunk of the reason Foodfight! flopped so badly was the nature of its concept. While films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Toy Story showed that the idea of a crossover film involving a bunch of branded characters could work, Foodfight! decided to focus on supermarket advertising mascots—while cartoon characters or toys can be separated from their brands somewhat, Foodfight!'s characters are brands, which causes it to come off as uncomfortably close to a feature-length advertisement. What's more, the literal moral of the film is "Brand Names Are Better, and Brand X is run by Nazis", which is not a good message for young children to absorb. And despite being a concept ill-suited to anyone but very small children, the film also introduces a lot of elements that kids would be unlikely to understand, such as what exactly its characters even are, or the countless Parental Bonus-type jokes. Even if not for the film's Troubled Production, the pure story alone is enough to leave most people baffled.
• This was one reason Frankenweenie was a box office disappointment. A black and white stop-motion animated feature focused around death and reanimation is a hard sell for today's families, especially when it's topped off by a violent climax. Disney didn't help matters by refusing to move its release date to distance it from the more accessible Hotel Transylvania and the equally-dark-and-quirky-but-released-first ParaNorman; when the former became a Sleeper Hit that exceeded industry expectations and had strong weekly holds, and the latter got the earliest wave of critical buzz, that burned off demand for another Halloween film for 2012.
• Once Lightyear underperformed at the box office, this point was raised by analysts, claiming that as beloved as Toy Story is, nobody had a real interest in the story of the "real" Buzz Lightyear. Many found the film's concept to be too confusing and unnecessary for it to be appealing, and having Buzz and Arch-Enemy Zurg portrayed very differently from their toy counterparts (not even their voice actors returned) didn't help. Fans of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command also disliked it for feeling that show had already done this idea much better, and were turned off by the film using nothing from it. What's more, even those who did take interest in the premise argued that the film's actual final product doesn't match up with the intended idea of "this is the movie Andy saw as a kid"—rather than a Genre Throwback to 1990s toyetic sci-fi, it's a pretty straightforward modern animated action film that barely resembles the toy line it inspired in-universe.
• Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank is a spiritual remake of Blazing Saddles, a very raunchy, politically incorrect movie, now being geared towards a family audience, mainly children. Its Troubled Production and unintentional similarities to Kung Fu Panda did not help it.
• Playmobil: The Movie is based off of a toyline considered niche, and had to deal with the stigma of toy-based movies being expected to be hollow Merchandise-Driven cartoons. Even worse, LEGO, a toyline that overshadows Playmobil in almost every way, had a movie a few years prior that both managed to defy the expectation that it would be a cheap cash-grab, but also managed to become a huge success, meaning that people were inevitably going to compare Playmobil's movie to it. Not only that, but said LEGO movie's sequel was released the same year as the Playmobil movie! All of this resulted in an opening weekend described as the worst opening in cinematic history for a film playing in over 2,300 theaters.
• The Road to El Dorado is an homage to the Road to ... films starring two Spanish thieves who find the titular city and get mistaken for gods. Further complicating things is that, like many other animated movies here, it can't decide whether it wants to appeal mainly to kids or adults. (Though a combination of this and bad marketing did lead to the movie failing at the box office, it largely contributed to the film's Cult Classic status.) Kevin Koch, an assistant animator, cited this trope as part of the reason for the film's lack of success:
  For me there were two major problems with The Road to El Dorado. First, it was a period piece set in South America — I thought at the time that that combination would be box office poison. There are certain settings and time periods that I don’t think modern audiences are interested in, even if the film is fantastic.
• Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss takes one of the most famous tragic plays of all time, replaces the characters with cute seals (the title characters are seal pups, making the whole romance story feel uncomfortable), and tones the story down for kids, adding a happy ending and a Kid-Appeal Character voiced and written by an actual child. Despite being made on a shoestring budget (thanks to almost everything being done by a single person), it failed to turn a profit.
• The Star, being an animated retelling of the birth of Christ, is a hard enough sell in mainstream cinema, but it's also a comedy where the events are told from the animals' perspective. Its box office conversely had a smaller initial opening debut than the creator's former movies.
• A pair of animated movies based on the Titanic disaster:
  • Titanic: The Legend Goes On takes a hundred-plus-years-ago tragedy and throws in a bunch of wacky hijinks to comprise everything prior to what actually happened.
  • The Legend of the Titanic takes the sinking of the Titanic (though, for the most part, treats things much more seriously than The Legend Goes On), and turns it into an anti-whaling Aesop, to say nothing about its fictional aversion of what happened in real life.
• Thomas and the Magic Railroad had a ton of factors going against it from the beginning. As popular as Thomas & Friends was, there was little general interest in a theatrical film starring Thomas the Tank Engine, with movies based on properties aimed at children historically doing awful at the box office. Even without that going against it, those who might've been interested in the film were turned off by the focus on new human characters over the familiar engine characters (some of whom were from a show created to introduce T&F to American audiences, and are largely unfamiliar to those living outside the country) and the inclusion of magical and fantasy elements, which many saw as a betrayal of the grounded realism that had defined the original Railway Series stories and the show up to that point. There's also the issue of the show's Supermarionation style. While the use of model trains with static faces worked for the show, it did not translate well to a feature-length movie (where expectations are higher than for a kids' show), with many criticizing the style, especially the static faces, for being cheap and shoddy by film standards. Despite a decent marketing campaign, these factors would cause the film to flop at the box office, only making $19.7 million on a $19 million budget.

Individual Films — Live-Action

• 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi combines a highly volatile subject matter with a divisive filmmaker whose previous attempt at a war film was not well-received, during an election year with a candidate who many conspiracy theorists blamed for the attacks. Add that it was released alongside Ride Along 2 while facing stiff holdovers, and it became a box office bomb.
• Absolute Beginners is an adaptation of a widely beloved novel that makes numerous controversial changes to the story and relies heavily on intimate knowledge of 1950s sociocultural movements and the historical background behind them. The combination of its handling of the source material and its esoteric plot meant that few were interested in seeing the film. Consequently, it was a critical whipping boy that lost £6.6 million at the box office, acting as one of three Creator Killers for Goldcrest Films. On the upside, it eventually got Vindicated by History decades later.
• The straight-to-DVD 2015 romantic comedy, Accidental Love, used to be David O. Russell's failed project Nailed which is about a waitress (played by Jessica Biel) who got a nail stuck in her head and then, went to appeal a congressman (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) to pass the health care bill. This was even made when Russell was still notorious for his troublesome on-set behavior at that time and anyone who had seen the film noticed that it looked very outdated - especially because a health care bill did pass in the years between filming and release. Now we know why Russell disowned it and used the Alan Smithee approach, and the movie’s distributor tried to pass it off as a romantic comedy.
• Alegría, the dramatic film inspired by the Cirque du Soleil show, is a fable that entwines the story of a street mime and a circus singer falling in Love at First Sight with that of unwanted children being forced to tend and sell flowers for a cruel taskmaster. Aside from people hating mimes, it's too dark and mature thematically for children — the story kicks off with the mime and his child friend both wanting to die, a supporting character is a lovelorn old alcoholic, etc. But not many teens or adults want to watch a movie about whimsical circus people helping each other to realize that they have A World Half Full. The film only made it to theaters in Canada and a few European countries.
• The American Society of Magical Negroes is a satire on the Magical Negro trope, centered on a secret society of black people whose job is to fulfill the lives of white people. The title alone made people uneasy and spawned memes about white people being unable to ask for tickets to the film, and many who hadn't heard of the trope thought the film was simply a black-centric HarryPotter-esque affair with nothing else going for it. All of this combined with poor reviews citing the film as poorly executed resulted in it bombing and being pulled from theatres after three weeks.
• American Ultra is a prime case of this. The plot is about a stoner who is trained by the CIA, but somehow doesn't know that they were trained by the CIA and the CIA now want the stoner dead... and that is a premise that nobody would know who to market towards. The supposed stoner comedy was a major flop and critical mess. Screenplay writer Max Landis stated in an interview with RedLetterMedia that the movie was marketed as a stoner comedy when it was never meant to be, and that audiences were not willing to give it a chance as a result.
• Amos & Andrew is a film about a black man who moves to a predominantly white island into a summer home who ends up getting mistaken for a criminal and nearly gets killed by police. And it's Played for Laughs, with much of the humor being sitcom-esque. Critics dismissed the film as racist tripe and it bombed in theatres.
• An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn has a serviceable starting point, on how directors can disown their movies by changing the credit to Alan Smithee, but it was fairly obscure trivia at the time, meaning that the film really needed a strong storyline to hang its hook on. But the intended satire of the film industry was lost in a too personalized script full of Take Thats and an obtuse format as a (mostly) retrospective Mockumentary that ended up making for a story that falls far too much under Take Our Word for It, and ends up being hard to follow for anyone who isn't knowledgeable about Hollywood politics.
• Anonymous (2011) is a film based on a common conspiracy theory that William Shakespeare did not actually write his plays, and they were instead written by the Earl of Oxford. The theory (and consequently, the film) requires a lot of familiarity with now-obscure figures and events from Elizabethan England; the average person has no idea who the Earl of Oxford even is, after all. However, the film also thoroughly villainizes Shakespeare, depicting him as a drunk, illiterate Hate Sink and a fraud, and takes massive liberties with history (e.g. heavily screwing with dates, depicting the Tudor Rose as an actual breed of rose, and claiming that Queen Elizabeth was not only not a virgin, but had so many bastards that she couldn't even keep track of them all, and the Earl of Oxford was her son and romantic partner). It's also directed by Roland Emmerich, who is best known for action schlock like Independence Day and Godzilla (1998). To paraphrase one critic, "you have to know the period to understand what's going on, and if you understand what's going on, you will hate what's going on." The film flopped pretty hard, and only made back half of its 30-million-dollar budget.
• Assholes (directed by actor and model Peter Vack) combines the mumblecore genre with extreme gross-out comedy and Body Horror with detailed close-ups of herpes sores, our main female protagonist defecating a demon, Incest Subtext, vomit and poop. The entire plot revolves around our main characters getting addicted to poppers and the toxic relationship that results from that (Played for Laughs, in this case). The title and trailer also outright advertise the fact that there are no truly likeable characters. The combination of genres (mumblecore, gross-out comedy and Sadist Show) is unlikely to appeal to anyone. David Ehrlich once said that the film played out "like a microbudget cross between Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and The Squid and the Whale". Despite receiving an award at SXSW, it has 4.3 on IMDb at time of writing and is featured on the Letterboxd list "The Most Controversial Films on Letterboxd" (which aggregates all the films on Letterboxd with the most variance in ratings) which cements the film's polarizing reception.
• The Assignment (2016): Many people generally disliked the idea of a man undergoing involuntary sex reassignment being played for horror/comedy (and very unrealistically), with some transgender rights groups advocating boycotting the film, although the director insists it really wasn't meant to be transphobic at all. Because of this, despite having a budget of only three million dollars, the film was still a massive Box Office Bomb.
• Baby's Day Out: Both Roger Ebert and Mr. Plinkett Reviews argued this to be why the film ultimately bombed critically and financially. The film is about a Straying Baby of the sort seen in all manner of classic animation, wandering around Chicago and getting into cartoony slapstick antics with goofy kidnappers... and it's all in live-action. While people may be happy to deal with this kind of premise in cartoons, seeing an actual baby getting abducted, wandering around a construction site, and nearly getting hit by a car was more frightening than funny for the parents who are most likely to want to see a movie starring a baby—such an audience obviously would not find rampant child endangerment particularly amusing. One scene actually needed to be reedited from the trailer because it showed the baby's head hitting the pavement. Additionally, being live-action causes a lot of moments that would normally be wacky slapstick to turn into Family-Unfriendly Violence (e.g. a man getting his crotch set on fire). And while the prior John Hughes effort Home Alone featured a somewhat similar concept, that managed to appeal to kids by making Kevin into something of an Escapist Character for a child audience, which doesn't work when your protagonist is a baby (babies are not known for asking to go to films). The film did at least perform much better in India, which has a storied tradition of cartoonish over-the-top live-action productions.
• Battleship is one of the most infamous cases of this. Both Universal and Hasbro were expecting huge numbers for the film after the latter's success with the Transformers Film Series. But while that series was based on a toyline that had decades of lore, Battleship was based on a board game with no plot, which sounded like an absurd idea to most people. They tried to spice it up by adding some sci-fi elements to the story, but that only made it look like every other blockbuster movie at the time. Ultimately, it ended up flopping (in the U.S., at least), and any plans for a sequel were sunk.
• Baywatch (2017) attempted to repeat the Deconstructive Parody route that worked for 21 Jump Street to please those who weren't fans of the TV show. And then came trailers showcasing that the cheeky self-references were annoying, and also that the film was loaded with Vulgar Humor. This certainly drove away potential Baywatch viewers and made it tank in the domestic box office (while faring somewhat better internationally).
• Beau Is Afraid is a picaresque horror comedy about a very anxious man attempting to get home in time for his mother's funeral. It's a very strange movie with a lot of very uncomfortable subject matter, including but not limited to a naked serial killer, tons of Black Comedy, Abusive Parents, and a giant penis monster. It's also three hours long. While Ari Aster built up a lot of good will with his previous films, it still flopped, and critics and fans alike were baffled by the choice to release it in IMAX, which isn't traditionally a good format for arthouse films with limited appeal.
• The Beaver is about a mentally-ill man who is able to communicate with a discarded beaver puppet. The concept itself is a hard sell, but the film stars Mel Gibson in the lead role and tries to portray him in a sympathetic context... at the time where Gibson had made headlines for controversial tirades against his ex-wife as well as his infamous DUI arrest. The film flopped and was met with a mixed reception among critics.
• Bombshell (2019) was an Acclaimed Flop that barely recouped its budget domestically for being a classic "film for no one": the movie is about Fox News (alienating liberal-leaning audiences who have disdain for the openly conservative network) regarding sexual misconduct at Fox News (alienating conservative-leaning audiences who consider Fox News to be a respectable channel), and any attempt to make the movie a "fun" look at Corrupt Corporate Executives a la The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short (the trailers heavily used Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy") didn't catch on. And a Forbes analyst added that Angst Aversion was probably in play, summing up Bombshell underperforming on how "folks didn't want to go to the movies to watch women get harassed and/or assaulted by powerful men", and women in particular "don't necessarily want to race out to the theater to watch something that explicitly reminds them of the horrors of the modern world."
• The Book of Henry features an abused girl that no one believes so because the abusive parent, a police commissioner, has connections, so the kid next door — Henry — decides to create a plan to save her... by killing her father! The jarring tone shifts (a glurgey first half, then Henry dies, and once his mother discovers the eponymous book with the plan, she goes on with it) make it even worse.
• Boxing Helena: A surgeon becomes obsessed with a woman, and amputates all four of her limbs so as to keep her in a box. Reportedly, the picture cost roughly $2 million to make in a decade when most Hollywood features cost about $50 million, and still managed to lose money. Quite notably, after Kim Basinger broke her contract and refused to do the film after reading the script, which managed to make a huge dent in her career for years despite it being a role she didn't play, yet it's still generally agreed this was the right decision and she would have fared even worse if she'd been in it. (The career of the actress that replaced her, Sherilyn Fenn, didn't fare any better, mind you.)
• Black Christmas (2019) was the second remake of the acclaimed (and Trope Maker for the Slasher Movie) original film… except with an incredibly unsubtle message about toxic masculinity and rape culture that the director bizarrely went out of the way to promote, even outright saying that she had put "message before plot". (The original movie already had a subtle pro-choice message.) Fans of the original film were dismayed by it not being a faithful adaptation, and general audiences, even those who would agree with the Aesop felt that the characters were douchebags with nobody worth rooting and/or caring for. Predictably, it was met with savage reviews and underperformed at the box office, with the ill-fated 2006 remake being perceived as So Bad, It Was Better.
• Bros was widely touted as the first mainstream gay romantic comedy, and while it was praised by critics, it performed poorly in the box office which many blamed on its marketing. The film was heavily promoted to general audiences, but most straight people, even if they're not homophobic, still thought that a gay romance simply wasn't for them. On the flip-side, many queer people were also put off from watching it precisely because the advertising made it look like it was pandering a Theme Park Version of LGBTQ+ culture to straights. But if you actually watch the movie, it's about the community's internal struggles and it makes a lot of queer-specific references that a straight person wouldn't get unless they're a close ally. As such, many feel that the movie would have fared better if it had been promoted primarily to queer audiences, since the average straight person wasn't going to watch it anyway.
• Caligula is extremely notorious in part because of this. It tried to be simultaneously a dramatic historical epic and a low-brow sexploitation film, and failed at both. The drama was too ludicrous for the mainstream, and even if it wasn't, they would have still been turned away by the depraved sexual acts. Meanwhile, the porno crowd didn't find the drama appealing, and the exploitation stuff wasn't titillating enough for them.
• The Call of the Wild (2020) was a film adaptation of the Jack London novel of the same name… except as a live-action/animation hybrid with Buck becoming a CGI dog and the story retooled for a family friendly audience. Adults who were interested in an adaptation didn't care for all of the changes and thought the CGI was distracting and unnecessary, while families were turned off because a film based on an old, dark, problematic and violent book (despite its presence in many grade-school libraries) didn't sound very kid-friendly, so it became a huge commercial flop (being released right as the COVID-19 Pandemic was starting to hit the film industry didn't help).
• Cats is the adaptation of a popular yet divisive stage show, already pushing away those who don't like musicals or the original productions — which to make matters worse, has a structure that works better on a stage, a succession of dance numbers scored to an "I Am" Song with barely a plot in-between. And then comes a trailer showing the characters are anthropomorphic cats with overly-human features right out of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley, which are oddly sexualized even though the movie is PG-rated, and the alienation was complete. (Even the Furry Fandom wanted nothing to do with the movie!) Add opening on Christmas weekend opposite Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, as well as other family-friendly fare such as Jumanji: The Next Level and Frozen II, and Cats went straight to the litterbox as a critical and commercial flop.
• Chaos Walking (2021) is an adaptation of a Young Adult book that came out over a decade prior to the movie's release and the trailers made it clear it was not an especially faithful adaptation beyond the basic premise, which was off-putting for fans of the novels; some readers were also wary of it being a live-action adaptation purely because the Noise - a key plot element - is difficult to translate well from book to film. Then there's the challenge of it being a teen-oriented dystopian movie that missed that genre's heyday by about five years; a lot of audiences were tired of these kinds of movies and didn't think Chaos Walking had anything much new to offer beyond the 'no women' and mental projection gimmicks (not helping is that many viewers felt these more interesting aspects of the premise were seriously underutilized in the film itself). Combined with all the well-publicized issues behind-the-scenes and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the general lack of interest in Chaos Walking contributed to it bombing at the box office.
• The 1930s movie Child Bride, which was seemingly about the horrors of child marriage, but leaned more towards... exploitation. As the subject matter was too disturbing for nearly all audiences, it was quickly forgotten and buried. Infamously, it was passed up by Mystery Science Theater 3000 because of this.
• This is likely one of the biggest reasons the 1986 adaptation of The Clan of the Cave Bear bombed at the box office. While the novels are by no means obscure - they were in fact at the height of their popularity in the 1980s - they're difficult to translate into film due to the story's structure (most of them, The Clan of the Cave Bear included, are heavy on exposition and internal monologues, and they're largely character-driven with little goal-oriented plot). Inevitably, a lot of things would have to be altered to make the story fit into a two-hour film format. Another issue is that the first book especially is not exactly feel-good fare, with lots of unpleasant content such as graphic violence, discrimination, child abuse, sexual assault and a Downer Ending. The end result is that fans of the books were wary of the changes to the story while the average viewer may have been put off by the grimmer content.
• Cloud Atlas is nearly three hours long and has six simultaneous plots with widely different tones (Period Drama, character-based drama, techno-thriller, farcical comedy, sci-fi action, Science Fantasy) and only thematic connections. To make it worse, to ensure the cast could have roles in all the stories, the cast is inevitably made over into different races, including non-Asian roles filling into Asian characters, which made many Asian-Americans want to boycott. Even those who don't mind such concern found that the makeover are either ugly or hideous. No wonder it didn't perform well in theaters, but good home video numbers mean it may become a Cult Classic. That said, the film was not universally panned: film critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four and called it "one of the most ambitious movies ever made".
• Clue, when in theaters, ran with the gimmick of Multiple Endings where a moviegoer would be treated to one of three different endings. This alienated the audience because they didn't want to go multiple times just to see all the endings (if possible), and the film performed poorly at the box office as a result. It says a lot that when the film was released on cable and video, and with all three endings combined together to make one (with two fake and one real), it performed far better and is still viewed as a Cult Classic today.
• An interesting case with Cuties. It was popular in its native France, and its story of a young Muslim girl rebelling against her conservative, strict, restrictive-for-women native Senegalese culture is based on the experiences of the film's director. Then Netflix bought the U.S. distribution rights and then caused one of the most disastrous, needlessly self inflicted wounds in the history of films. It promoted the film as a sexy dance film with 11 year old girls. The original trailer and poster (we won't link but feel free to search with an incognito browser and possibly a VPN) were both unrepresentative of the film and wildly sexualized. The poster for example, features the four girls in their skimpy dance outfits and one of them in mid-twerk. Netflix quickly changed the marketing to what the film actually is, but the damage was done and the film is only remembered for the original marketing and is somewhat unfairly considered legalized child porn today. (Somewhat because the film does feature sexualized dancing by the young girls and some very squick-ish scenes, even if they were there to enforce the film’s message.)
• The Dark Crystal: Reading through contemporary reviews shows that few people could fathom the concept that a film made with puppets, and helmed by perhaps the most beloved children's entertainer of his time Jim Henson, could possibly be for anyone over age 10, resulting in it being castigated for being far too dark and scary for kids. This is exactly what Henson was going for, as he'd always hated being pigeonholed as only doing work for children and wanted to branch out to adult-oriented material. His follow-up film Labyrinth was clearly an attempt to strike more of a balance, with more kid-friendly characters and the lead heroine and villain played by human actors, but it still was too much of a stretch for critics and audiences of the time, sending him into a Creator Breakdown he never had time to quite recover from before his death a few years later. Luckily, both films have since become seriously reevaluated and are now beloved Cult Classics.
• The Day the Clown Cried: A key reason, though not the only one, this Jerry Lewis film will never be released. A movie about a German clown (Lewis) who entertains doomed children at a concentration camp isn't going to fly over well. With anyone. Lewis himself kept his own copy locked up and refused to mention it when asked. He donated it to the Library of Congress some time prior to his death, on the stipulation it would not be screened until 2024.
• With a title like Dear White People, you know a movie is going to be controversial. Racism is a pretty touchy topic and the heavily politicized feel turned off many viewers, especially white viewers. Word of God insists the film isn't meant to be taken seriously and is more about personal identity, but the title and trailer doesn't really give that impression to the casual white viewer. That said, when it was adapted as a Netflix series, it did pretty well and ran for four seasons.
• Dick, a comedy set in the 1970s about two teenage girls who develop a crush on Richard Nixon and end up becoming major figures in the Watergate scandal. Teens weren't interested in a comedy based around 1970s nostalgia while adults weren't interested in the revisionist history concept (the film also depicts Woodward and Bernstein as a pair of morons) so the film died a quick death at the box office, plus the Historical In-Joke that the girls were the Watergate informant "Deep Throat" turned the movie into an Unintentional Period Piece a few years later when W. Mark Felt admitted he was the true identity of "Deep Throat". However, it has become a Cult Classic over the years.
• Disco Godfather, an action drama with almost no comic elements starring Rudy Ray Moore, had so many strikes against it from the very beginning that it was effectively doomed before it hit theaters. First, it came out in the autumn of 1979, just in time for disco's reputation to have already turned into a joke and an embarrassment, making Moore's character Tucker Williams — a badass ex-cop disco DJ — more ridiculous than cool. While it was somewhat more current in depicting angel dust as the scourge of black American youth at the time, the way that drug trips and addiction are depicted is absurd unintentional comedy, with users mentally tortured by hallucinations of the kind of cackling demons that Moore had previously played for laughs in Petey Wheatstraw; even though the climax features the hero trying to defy the evil spirit of PCP itself, manifested as an Angel of Death that robs him of his sanity while releasing his nephew Bucky from her grasp, the threat of drugs is always played deadly serious. Most damningly of all, Moore keeps away from his strengths — Tucker never tells any filthy jokes and refrains from foul language and outrageous behavior, the things that Rudy Ray was so talented at and made Dolemite beloved by audiences — in favor of his weaknesses (flat dramatic acting and preachiness). Moore retired as a leading man shortly after, restricting himself to small supporting roles or cameos where he reprised the character of Dolemite, and continued to perform stand-up until his death, though he never quite reached the heights that he had in the 70s.
• Dragonslayer was a deconstructive fantasy about, well, a dragon slayer, loaded with darker themes akin to something this side of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, co-produced by Disney and Paramount. And it was rated PG. Families and children avoided it because of the very dark themes despite its PG rating, including blood, murder, scary dragons, arguments over religion, partial nudity, and women being sacrificed to dragons (showing the viewers the messy results). Those pining for darker and edgier fantasy avoided it as well because they saw it... as a "PG-rated film by Disney". It flopped at the box office and was largely forgotten by both studios as a result. Though years later, some viewers liked it after getting past the premise, making the film a bit of a Cult Classic nowadays.
• The documentary Earthlings already touches on a pretty heated subject regarding dietary habits, but between its clear appeal to emotion and equating modern society with that of the Nazis for using animals for food (something the human species has done since the dawn of its existence), it's really easy to see why this movie would be off-putting, if not downright offensive, to most people.
• Exit to Eden was a 1994 Romantic Comedy film starring Dana Delany and directed by Garry Marshall, and featuring Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in a major comic relief subplot. Sounds like a pretty safe bet—unless you know that it was based on a kinky BDSM romance novel written by Anne Rice, and Delany's character is a Dominatrix. General audiences (who might otherwise have enjoyed the comedy and romance) were largely turned off by the film's frank portrayal of sadomasochistic relationships, while kinksters (who might otherwise have enjoyed the BDSM) found it too silly to be erotic. (Not mentioning the fact that that no one wanted to see Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in S&M outfits). The result was an infamous Box Office Bomb, which is still frequently cited as one of the worst films of the 1990s.
• Fantastic Four (2015) was a dark and serious reimagining of a whimsical and light-hearted superhero team, full of Body Horror and largely devoid of action. Naturally, this scared off fans of both the source material and superhero movies. Fans of the classic Fantastic Four disliked the grounded premise that excised the more fantastical and bizarre elements of the comics. People who enjoyed the gritty Ultimate Fantastic Four, which the film was supposedly based on, were unhappy that the film would not be a faithful adaptation. To top it all off, several fans wanted it to fail, in the hopes that Fox would sell or give the rights to the team back to Marvel Studios for inclusion in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which would eventually happen in 2019 when Disney completed its acquisition of Fox and most of its assets, including the Fantastic Four film rights). Unsurprisingly, it was a commercial and critical flop, turning this attempt into a Stillborn Franchise the moment it came out.
• The Farm is a movie about a cannibal commune where people are raised as livestock and used for meat and milk. Putting aside the torture scenes, the movie contains numerous things that will only appeal to particular groups. The movie has the humans kept in tiny crates meant to obviously represent the kinds of treatments of dairy cows and large-scale pig farms. There is one scene in particular where an infant is smashed on the ground. It's probably not surprising, given the aesop and method of delivery, that the director had ties to members of PETA. Based on the reviews of the movie on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, most viewers were fine with the premise, but that one infamous scene put them off and made the message Anvilicious "shock value" to the point of being offputting.
• The Benedict Cumberbatch film The Fifth Estate was a thriller about hacker/activist Julian Assange, who is still considered a controversial figure by many Americans for Wikileaks supposedly being involved in the Russian meddling in 2016's election in favor of Donald Trump, as well as the never-resolved sexual assault charges levelled at him (he hid in an embassy for several years to avoid being taken to court). Add to it that the Misaimed Marketing made it look like the movie was trying to rewrite history and turn Assange into some sort of kick-ass action hero, and it's no wonder it turned out to be a Box Office Bomb. It didn't help that the film was based on a book written by a former associate of Assange who has since become one of his most hated rivals. That assured that even those who vehemently support Assange would refuse to go see it, on the assumption that the film would make him look bad.
• Flash of Genius was a Docudrama about Robert Kearns, his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper, and his lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company. Problem was, the subject matter was very mundane and the real-life event isn't well-known to most people. Unsurprisingly, it failed to attract most moviegoers and didn't even make a quarter of its budget back. As Bomb Report describes it:
  "Windshield wipers + no star power = flop."
• Freddy Got Fingered, which starred absurdist comedian Tom Green, was almost universally denounced, disparaged, and ridiculed. Although mainstream TV ads for the movie looked harmless enough, the film itself followed the misadventures of an apparently mentally handicapped man who made it his life's mission to be as bizarre and offensive as possible (licking an open wound, wearing a bloody deer carcass as clothing, etc.). Roger Ebert at least paid this movie the compliment of reminding him of the classic surrealist film Un Chien Andalou - but then, moviegoers in 1929 hated that, too.
  Kyle Kallgren: This cannot be Dada! It's too normal to be Dada! It's too shit to be anything else!
• Fun Size is a movie produced by Nickelodeon's theatrical film company that looks like it's aiming for the tween girl demographic like Nick's many kidcoms (it starred Victoria Justice, hot off the success of Victorious), yet it's rated PG-13. The movie's too crude for young kids (the trailers alone highlight this), and the find-the-missing-little-brother plot is too childish for the tweens.
• Errol Morris's debut documentary embodies this trope — Gates of Heaven is about a family-run pet cemetery faced with closure and the challenge of finding new resting places for its inhabitants. It's a sweet, gentle film, but it's not surprising to learn that Werner Herzog's infamous shoe-eating venture was the result of a bet he lost with Morris over whether it could get released at all!
• This was one of the reasons cited for the box office failure of Ghost in the Shell (2017). While the 90s anime movie has Cult Classic status in the United States, there's still a large number of people who had never heard of the franchise. This proved problematic with the marketing, which seemed to be trying to appeal to hardcore fans instead of casual moviegoers, who of course tend to outnumber anime fans. Also complicating things was the fact that a lot of the themes and imagery used in the trailer had already been covered in The Matrix, which caused many potential viewers to think the movie looked like a tired rehash (in fact, The Wachowskis admitted that GITS was a major inspiration for them). Another issue is that despite the film being marketed to them, many hardcore fans of the original films and series avoided it since the filmmakers took too many creative liberties with the license. Then there was the infamous controversy over having Scarlett Johansson play the Major, AKA Motoko Kusanagi, which dominated the entire conversation about the movie and made many nerds antsy about supporting it. As one writer put it:
  "A lot of journalists – especially fan bloggers – who would normally breathlessly cover this kind of movie approached it with a lot of caution. No one wants to seem socially ignorant, so a whole lot of sites that generally provide free PR offered far less support. As a result, the movie got way less play online, and when Johansson did get interviewed, she often had to defend her casting."
• New Line Cinema attempted to follow up their spectacular success with The Lord of the Rings by adapting another famous fantasy novel series, and settled on His Dark Materials. Unfortunately, the series had become Overshadowed by Controversy as its author Philip Pullman had openly stated that his goal was to provide an atheist answer to the Christian-based fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, in which the heroes' ultimate goal is to "kill God." This subtext had remained under the surface enough in the first two books to not cause much trouble, but exploded in the third and became a favorite target of the Catholic Church and evangelical pundits. New Line's response was to tone down these elements as much as possible, changing the villainous organization the Magisterium from a clear parallel of the church to a more generic Evil Empire. This ended up pleasing no one: the people who were complaining in the first place were not the sort to back down over a slight story change, and the fans of the series were outraged at such Bowdlerization and wondered why the studio had bothered getting the rights to such a controversial series if they weren't prepared to go all the way with it. The first (and to this day, the only) film, The Golden Compass was released to middling reviews and mediocre box office (the latter in North America, anyway), and the future films were scrapped. Its domestic failure also caused Warner Bros. to absorb New Line and did a number on rising star Dakota Blue Richards' career as well. The books would later get another adaptation, this time a television series, that would fare much better than the film did.
• Hanzo the Razor is a trilogy of films about a samurai detective/metsuke solving various corruptions in Edo Japan. The series mixes this relatively interesting premise with blaxploitation-inspired music and editing, but the problem is that Hanzo himself is a Designated Hero who is just as repugnant as the murderers and thieves he encounters along the way, due to raping women to get the information he needs. The worst part, they enjoy it by the end usually.
• The Happytime Murders suffered from this big time. A hard-R involving Muppet-like puppets didn't appeal to many people (Meet the Feebles suffered from this same problem), on top of Melissa McCarthy's declining star power as a result of several bad career decisions (including this one) and the fact that The Jim Henson Company, who co-produced the film, has had several not-very-well-received projects come out within the decade under the Henson Alternative label the film would go under^note quite a few promising projects of theirs fell by the wayside; Happytime was lucky enough to be Saved from Development Hell. The film's main selling point was the novelty of R-rated puppets — except that coming long after Avenue Q, Greg the Bunny, Team America: World Police, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared and the aforementioned Meet the Feebles, the novelty was gone. Not even the Muppet fandom, usually quick to positively reassess failed works years after and with defenders of almost everything, has had much kindness to it, as many were burnt out by the failed projects of the Henson Alternative label at that point (of which it was the last made for the screen, the label and adult Henson works becoming exclusive to stage shows after, albeit to the expense of the more warmly received Netflix series The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell). Overlapping fandom with Avenue Q and Don't Hug Me I'm Scared gave a lot of Muppet fans halt about the use of adult puppetry just for raunchy humor upon seeing it be used for more. As such, there was a notable lack of pre-release fandom hype, and most discussion at the time was on the then-unreleased The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance instead. It naturally was met with weak reviews and floundered in the box office against Crazy Rich Asians.
• Harold is a 2008 indie comedy film about a 14 year-old with early baldness making him look like a 50 year-old which in itself is a pretty alienating premise. Aside from an abysmal 30% in Rotten Tomatoes it only gathered some $13000 on a $3.5 million budget. Nevertheless Spencer Breslin was praised for his portrayal.
• Harold and Maude is... a tricky sell. The film is a romantic Black Comedy, following the brewing friendship and romantic relationship between a proto-Emo Teen who habitually fakes his own suicide in elaborate ways and a feisty Manic Pixie Dream Girl who happens to be 79 years old. Upon release in 1971, it received middling reviews and bombed commercially, and it took at least a decade for audiences and critics alike to reevaluate the film as an underrated classic of black, existentialist comedy, finally making a profit in 1983.
• 2019's The Haunting of Sharon Tate could only qualify as this. What would have been an otherwise generic and forgettable horror film made the incredibly tasteless decision to attach the tragic murders of Sharon Tate and her friends in order to draw in a wider audience. In addition to the largely offensive account of her final days which portrays Sharon's real-life friends and fellow victims as freeloaders and nuisances (even at one point, fellow victim Jay Sebring refers to them as "housemates from Hell"), Sharon herself (played by Hilary Duff in a Razzie-winning performance) is portrayed as increasingly crazy partially due to her pregnancy. Unlike Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning account that also featured a fictionalized portrayal of the actress where she survives her murder by the Manson family, Sharon's family disowned the film and critics and fans alike agreed wholeheartedly, even citing it as the worst film of the year with it currently holding an 8% rating on Metacritic.
• Hellboy (2019) is a Darker and Edgier reboot adapting a character that had already appeared in two movies. The fact those were modest hits at best showed the demonic anti-hero fighting supernatural threats was not exactly the most mainstream superhero, and the producers ensured more things against the movie with a Darker and Edgier/ Bloodier and Gorier approach giving high content ratings that limited the audience, while also driving away existing fans who would've rather seen Guillermo del Toro complete a trilogy. Hence when Hellboy arrived in theaters only to burn out very quickly, it was pretty clear audiences were not excited for this reboot.
• Home Sweet Home Alone, Disney's 2021 Home Alone reboot, was sharply criticized for this. Notably, the film's designated stand-ins for the Wet Bandits are a financially struggling married couple with children who plan to sell a valuable antique doll to avoid losing their home, and ultimately break into the protagonist's house to take back the doll after he seemingly steals it from them out of spite. Despite the antagonists being two perfectly nice and well-adjusted people whose actions are more-or-less completely justified, they still get put through every bit as much hell as Marv and Harry in the original film. Questionable execution aside (the film was also heavily criticized for the protagonist coming off as a thoroughoughly detestable spoiled brat, in contrast to the generally likeable Kevin McCallister), most viewers simply weren't able to get past the premise of a Home Alone reboot with two completely sympathetic burglars in the antagonist role.
• Hugo was rife with things to alienate audiences despite the name of Martin Scorsese attached. A director mostly known for R-rated fare doing a family film... which in turn is a Period Piece with no big names (at most, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Kingsley in secondary roles)... opening the same weekend as The Muppets (2011). No wonder that in spite of all the positive reviews, even becoming a major award contender, Hugo barely recouped its huge budget at the box office.
• I Am Not an Easy Man, a French film from 2019 was a satire about gender relations and sexual harassment set in a Lady Land Alternate Universe but its mixture of satire, hard truth and rom-com made it difficult to know who to market to; it wasn't a traditional Rom Com but as a satire, it was very Juvenalian (mocking, abrasive and caustic). The main characters were largely unlikeable, and the world was a terrible place to live in - for both universes and also the cross-dressing (meant to show men in a women's position) was outright Fan Disservice and Squick, even if it was satire. A High Concept movie that posed the question "What if women were men, and men were women?". It wasn't quite sure how to handle the topic of misogyny and misandry well, given that it was a mixture of Rom Com and satire. As a whole, it fell between two stools being not quite one thing but not quite the other. People who wanted a traditional Rom Com would not have enjoyed the gender politics as the theme, whereas people looking for a more intellectual film wouldn't have enjoyed the Rom Com aspect, and although it tried to give An Aesop on sexism and double standards, the film was seen as having more of a Lost Aesop. In general, it was a hard sell and marketing it was difficult.
• I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a twofer in terms of hard sell. On one hand, it's an extremely metaphorical/non-literal movie that quietly references a variety of different arts and media to create a rather complicated story that will likely require a second viewing to fully understand. However, it's also a very depressing movie about a dying relationship though really it's about a relationship that only ever existed in the imagination of an aging highschool janitor who, while rather intelligent, never actually did anything with his life; the entire movie is metaphorically about him contemplating suicide, with it being very ambiguous whether he killed himself at the end. All of which may stop you from wanting to watch it again. While critics generally enjoyed it, general audiences were much more divided on it.
• Inchon was a movie about a major battle in the Korean War. It was also a propaganda vehicle for the Unification Church, directly funded by founder Sun Myung Moon. Given that the Church is widely seen as a cult today, and was even less popular then, it was immediately viewed with suspicion, and it took years to find a willing distributor (along with not being very good in spite of the big names and budget, resulting in a critical and commercial disaster never released on home video). It did, however, provide the world with Laurence Olivier's famous Money, Dear Boy quote, and an acclaimed soundtrack album.
• Jem and the Holograms (2015) was an attempted Live-Action Adaptation of the 80s cartoon Jem, trying to follow the successes of Transformers (2007) and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Unfortunately, it ended up barely resembling the source material; the cartoon was about adult women with full time careers as well as adventures, and the film aged them down to teenagers to make the story resemble Hannah Montana more. The goofy, irreverent tone of the cartoon was likewise brought back to grounded realism, removing a lot of the fun that fans loved about it. Then there was the controversial removal of The Misfits, a rival band to the Holograms, who don't show up until The Stinger. Adding to that was an extremely generic plot that hit off several clichés about overnight fame and was more a retelling of Justin Bieber's rise to fame than anything resembling Jem. Despite having a small $5 million budget, it was a disastrous bomb that was pulled from theatres after only two weeks.
• Disney faced this with its adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series: the title of the first book, A Princess of Mars, was seen as being too alienating for the young male audience who would be the natural target for an adaptation of the classic pulp action story^note It doesn't help that Disney + princess = a girly franchise. They instead titled the film John Carter, which ended up being equally unappealing as despite the massive influence of the series, Carter himself hasn't gained the kind of name recognition (especially compared to Burroughs' other major hero Tarzan) for his name alone to get many people interested. The result was that a film various people had been trying to get off the ground for almost a century bombed hard and created a Stillborn Franchise.
• John Q. outside of the United States. Foreign audiences find the premise of The Hero taking an ER at gunpoint after being denied life-saving surgery alien and unrelatable (though not necessarily bad or uninteresting) because either healthcare is easier to come by, guns are harder to come by, or both.
• Just Visiting is an Americanized 2001 time-travel comedy based off the French Les Visiteurs series. But the American side didn't care as it was based off the French series almost no one knew about, while the French were alienated by the many differences between this film and the parent series. It was a Box Office Bomb all the way around and was turned into an Un-Reboot after Les Visiteurs: Bastille Day ignored the events of this film.
• A Karate Christmas Miracle (starring Eric Roberts) is not what you'd expect from its title. On the surface, it tells the story of a boy who believes that if he earns a black belt in Karate, Santa might bring his long-missing father home for Christmas. Sounds heartwarming, right? Until you learn that the father disappeared during a mass shooting at a movie theater, and is last seen being threatened by a clown with a gun. So, essentially, the Aurora tragedy! Taking into account the possible poor taste of the subject matter, the fact is that the film doesn't know if it wants to be a heartwarming Christmas fable or a dark commentary on gun control. Consider that the film's writer, Kenneth del Vecchio (who also plays the father) has made politically-charged movies in the past, owing to him being a law student. It's as if the filmmakers wanted to make a straight social-commentary movie but the financiers decided to shoehorn Christmas into it because they thought it would sell better.
• The Killing of John Lennon is Exactly What It Says on the Tin - a film about John Lennon's assassin. Technique-wise, it's not a bad film, and contrary to what some critics claim, it doesn't make the killer look any more sympathetic — if anything, he looks worse, because the film portrays him as a bigot, a bully, and a shitty husband. But many fans of Lennon want the assassin to fade into obscurity and actively try not to even mention the assassin by name, much less want to watch a film about him.
• M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is a Live-Action Adaptation of a popular cartoon series of the same name. Unlike other films of its kind, however, the original series wasn’t that old, which made it feel unnecessary. The original cartoon is Animesque, with a lot of supernatural elements and abilities that would be hard to translate into live-action (especially in 2010), which is why, compared to the show, the movie’s characters feel much weaker. This made fans of the series dismiss the movie as an unfaithful to its source material. It also completely changed the character’s races. Even people who weren’t familiar with the cartoon would have a hard time watching it, since it tries to retell the entirety of the show’s first season within 90 minutes, making the film’s plot feel, confusing, crowded, and poorly-paced. All these factors led to it being a critical and financial disaster.
• The Last Duel is essentially a historical legal drama, a gloomy, slow-paced period piece, lacking on crowd-pleasing fare such as romance (in fact, it centers around an arranged marriage and how the wife was raped) or combat (aside from some brief battles and the title duel at the end). So in spite of big names attached (director Ridley Scott, an All-Star Cast including Matt Damon, Ben Affleck - both of whom also wrote the script - and Adam Driver), the studio didn't care to promote it - or at least didn't know how - and it became an Acclaimed Flop, opening to just $9 million with a nine-digit budget.
• Lawn Dogs: A 10-year-old girl and a 21-year-old man become close friends. It's rated R. Their relationship is mostly platonic, but there are strong hints that the girl has feelings for the man. Not many people want to watch a movie about this, though those that did often considered the film to be excellent.
• The 1981 epic Lion of the Desert, starring Anthony Quinn. It is a powerful anti-colonialist film, but it is set in a conflict not many know about (1920s Libya), with a hero not very famous outside of his country and enemies that aren't often seen as "scary" enough in cinema. The death blow comes with the fact that it was commissioned and financed by Muammar Gaddafi, making potential viewers avoid the film for considering it propaganda. Too bad, because according to most critics it is actually good.
• Man on the Moon: For all the spilled ink about Andy Kaufman, most people who weren't already in showbiz only remembered him as a Funny Foreigner on a well-done but short-lived sitcom; those who remembered his other work either loved or loathed him. The filmmakers were perfectly aware that this trope applied and the writers even begged Universal Pictures to launch the film on the festival circuit rather than position it as a mainstream Christmas blockbuster, but because Jim Carrey was playing Kaufman higher-ups believed it could be a hit out of the gate. It ended up getting mixed reviews and was Carrey's first box-office flop as an A-lister, but he wasn't bothered; as he told Playboy a few years later, "I don't think it was meant to do a lot of business, because Andy didn't do a lot of business. We were true to him and polarized the same people."^note Though the theatrical run wasn't a complete disaster in a vacuum, the film made nearly $50 million at the box office, not too bad for a biopic. The problem was that it cost a little over $80 million to make, which was a really high budget for this kind of movie. (The film found an unexpected Periphery Demographic on DVD and cable: the younger end of Carrey's fanbase, who were unable to see the film in theaters due to its R-rating and came to the subject matter cold — they found it fascinating. It also found a smaller periphery demo in Professional Wrestling fans, as Kaufman is almost a mythical figure in pro wrestling fandom thanks to his feud with Jerry Lawler, who played himself in the film.)
• The 1997 McHale's Navy movie was a Setting Update of a period sitcom from the 1960s about a PT boat crew in World War II, reimagining the characters as a misfit gang of modern-day US Navy officers battling a Russian terrorist in the Caribbean. Fans of the original sitcom were turned off by the drastic changes to the source material, while nearly everyone under the age of 40 was turned off by the antiquated source material itself. The result was one of the biggest flops of the '90s, grossing barely one tenth of its budget. It probably didn't help that McHale's Navy doesn't exactly have the iconic status or Multiple Demographic Appeal of, say, The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch, Mission: Impossible, or Star Trek.
• Milk Money: A lighthearted comedy about three young boys trying to see a prostitute naked. Then it gets even crazier when the prostitute is introduced to the father of one of the boys as a potential love interest. The premise was too raunchy for kids and too tame for adults (it's rated PG-13), and bombed at the box office as a result.
• Mishima A Life In Four Chapters: While the film was and is critically acclaimed, it was an Acclaimed Flop. Most American audiences didn't even know of Yukio Mishima or his works outside of the film itself, not even Japanese-Americans, and so didn't really bother watching, not helped by large portions being in Japanese. Meanwhile in Japan, where Mishima is far too politically charged to discuss, audiences found a film about such political views too off-putting to watch, to the point it went straight to TV there and with no home release.
• Mom and Dad: While there hasn't really been an outcry about the film, it still hasn't been watched by most people. When a film is about parents wanting to murder their children, and the film is relentless, gory and filled with Black Comedy to boot, you can kind of understand why the premise alone gets this reaction.
• Mommie Dearest. Roger Ebert summed it up pretty well; it’s two hours of a screeching caricature of Joan Crawford beating the shit out of her daughter. Interestingly, the film actually did very well despite the alienating premise... but only because everyone heard how So Bad, It's Good it supposedly was and watched the movie to laugh at it, causing the studio to try and save face by altering the movie’s marketing to make it look like an intentional comedy.
• Monster Hunter (2020): The earliest previews of the film killed almost all interest in it right from the start from the primary game fanbase because of two major elements of the film. One is it featured the bizarre introduction of the human military in a Trapped in Another World plot, a plot device which tends to be highly contentious already, and one that was never in any of the games. Two is it was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who has gained infamy for his very loose and largely reviled Resident Evil Film Series, and was now given the reins of another treasured Capcom franchise to shoehorn his wife into as an out-of-place grizzled Action Girl hero again. Fans of the game were turned off by the unnecessary cross-dimensional military story elements that overshadow the rest of the movie, while general audiences and fans alike would be turned off by the director's entire prior filmography being schlock, and Monster Hunter obviously being more of the same. These factors, plus a one-off line that was interpreted as a Sinophobic insult and led to the movie being pulled from Chinese theatres and review-bombed by Chinese viewers, and releasing in theatres in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic led to the film financially bombing.
• Mortal Engines became the biggest confirmed Box Office Bomb of all time upon release. It is based on a niche Young Adult Literature series whose premise of "cities on wheels" seems too ludicrous for mainstream audiences. The cast also lacked popular actors besides Hugo Weaving and Stephen Lang, making it difficult to excite its fanbase and attract non-fans. The premise and casting badly hurt the marketing, which had to rely more on the promise of spectacle and Peter Jackson's involvement (even though he was only credited as a writer and producer, and not the director). And this isn't even getting into the controversial Adaptational Attractiveness of the facially-disfigured female lead...
• Even for a director who built his career on artsy Surreal Horror, Darren Aronofsky's mother! is pretty out there. A nameless husband and wife find their remote house descended upon by an increasing parade of aggressively quirky characters, all while everyone but the wife as our viewpoint character refuses to acknowledge that there's a single thing remotely out of the ordinary about any of it. Then the last half hour finally gives up any pretense of logical sense and becomes a nonstop parade of nightmarish violence and...more stuff best not elaborated on. Your response to it is highly dependent on when or even if you realize — and appreciate — how the whole thing is a microcosm of the Bible, in an extension of the rather unique view of religion shown in his previous film Noah. And then there's the fact that Aronofsky and his star Jennifer Lawrence started dating during production, which creates a quite creepy Reality Subtext to everything. It was a rare Box Office Bomb for the director and got an F on Moviescore (reviews were divisive), and the best way to view how it came about is him thinking "I've gotten all the prestige I'm ever going to get, so now it's time to go completely nuts and see just how far I can go before someone stops me." Not helping matters was the marketing selling the movie as a generic home invasion thriller, giving the audiences expecting that kind of film quite a shock.
• Music would've been a tough sell even if it didn't face a laundry list of controversies before its release. The plot revolves around a recovering alcoholic taking care of her Inspirationally Disadvantaged autistic sister, which to people that didn't find any of the film's surrounding details offensive, merely sounded like outdated Oscar Bait. It was only either sent straight-to-VOD or given a limited release outside of the director's native Australia (though that was also due to being released in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic), and even there it flopped.
• My Big Fat Independent Movie is a broad spoof based on independent films, with a general tone and tenor similar to the post-Scary Movie era of spoofs where the plot is more or less a succession of references and cameos of characters from other movies held together by Vulgar Humor. These kinds of movies were successful in their time, but targeted themselves at the lowest of lowbrow viewers, who would recognize maybe two of the films being parodied. Meanwhile, fans of independent films tend to passionately love those films, which are by nature obscure underdogs and often deal with serious and heartfelt subject matter, and would therefore be unhappy to see them get dragged through the mud. In short, the film is aimed at the Venn diagram of people who recognize Amélie Poulain, and people who want to see Amélie Poulain get punched in the face (this isn't hyperbole, it was one of the film's posters◊). The result: on a tiny budget of three million dollars, it grossed 4.6... thousand.
• This is key to why Newsies bombed in 1992: A drama about a 1899 newsboys' strike — and it's a musical! Disney had seen so much success with animated musicals at the turn of the decade that they saw potential in this live-action one; Jeffrey Katzenberg compared it to Oliver! But there hadn't been a blockbuster, live-action movie musical since 1978's Grease that didn't clearly take place in a fantastical context (e.g., the Muppet films). To some viewers, a dramatic, realistic musical ended up coming off as unrelatable, especially when lighter fare like Beethoven and FernGully: The Last Rainforest was on offer that particular spring. Moreover, they were likely turned off by the cast lacking in (then-)name performers^note The only two major stars in the movie at the time were Robert Duvall and Ann-Margret, who were well-known but not bankable (both at this point being well past the height of their careers) while star Christian Bale only had Empire of the Sun to his name. (if, again, they weren't turned off by the fact that it was a musical), and for some, its setting didn't have obvious appeal. There is a happy ending here — while it was a Box Office Bomb, it did well in the video aftermarket and became a Cult Classic, to the point that it received a successful Screen-to-Stage Adaptation in 2011.
• Night of the Lepus: Even if Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits can be scary, it's telling that the trailers go out of their way to not show any of them, raising the question: if you believe your monsters aren't scary, why would you still make a movie about them? What makes this even more inexplicable was that the film was based on a novel which treated "killer bunny rabbits" as intentionally silly, but this film portrays it completely straight. It was so panned it became one of those "legendary bad movies" because of this.
• Nine Lives (2016) was a film revolving around the idea of a guy switching bodies with a cat and learning how to be a good father as a result. The "human inhabits body of animal" shtick had been done to death several times in the '90s and early 2000s (most notably with Fluke). As a result, people weren't inclined to see the film despite (or possibly because of) Kevin Spacey starring in it and being directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and it consequently failed to make back its budget, on top of being deemed a cinematic hairball by critics. To top it off, this was about a year before Spacey's fall from grace, making this movie even harder to enjoy.
• North is supposedly an uplifting tale about a boy who travels around the world to find better parents. Unfortunately, this was cancelled out with a parade of blatant racial stereotypes; furthermore, while it's a kids' movie with adult jokes here and there, the "child-friendly" scenes are too childish for adults while the "adult jokes" are too raunchy for kids. In short, no member of the target audience is pleased. It's now best known for inspiring Roger Ebert's famous "hated, hated, hated this movie" rant.
• The Nutcracker in 3D is a lavish, big-budget adaptation of a timeless ballet... with minimal dancing and really dumb lyrics affixed to the classic score. That alone might have made it a tricky sell, but then there's the shoddy special effects, the Unintentional Uncanny Valley-riddled designs for the Nutcracker and other characters, the fact that the main antagonist is A Nazi by Any Other Name, and the narmtastic dialogue. Like North before it, it's too scary for kids and too unsophisticated for adults.
• The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure: As many reviewers have pointed out, the very concept of a theatrical film that encourages small children to make as much noise as possible in a movie theatre is not going to appeal to many parents. Your own children dancing around to a movie at home is one thing; dancing around in the crowded aisles of a theatre with dozens of other children is quite another. Though, considering the box office numbers, 'dozens' turned out to be wild optimism.
• Osmosis Jones is a live-action/animated hybrid, already setting off the Animation Age Ghetto. Worse, the parts with actors are heavy on gross-out moments, and the cartoon parts full of Parental Bonus and Family-Unfriendly Violence that certainly aimed more at grown-ups. Add the studio underpromoting what was already a hard sell, and it flopped on theaters - though it still originated a spin-off series and later became a Cult Classic.
• Paint Your Wagon: It's a western starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. But it's also a musical in which they share a bride! There are very few that would enjoy all of these elements together, and the film would become a laughing stock as a result. No wonder Homer and Bart were shocked when they watched a parodic version of it in The Simpsons episode "All Singing, All Dancing".
• Passengers (2016). The premise seemed attractive enough for viewers with A-list casting of Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, but the plot twist obscured by the trailers was that the male lead essentially kidnapped the female lead from her future life to make his less lonely, and yet they later have a romantic reconciliation. Several critics were so offended that they willingly spoiled the twist in their reviews. That, and word of mouth made this film quickly sink.
• The makers of Philadelphia deliberately countered this problem by hiring A-list actor Tom Hanks to play the lead out of fears that the 1993 audience would be turned off by the premise, which is about a gay man who has HIV.
• The Mexican movie Pink (2016) was created by Christian director Paco del Toro (no relation to Guillermo del Toro) to "warn of the grave error of allowing homosexual couples to adopt children." The first trailer made it clear that the film was a parade of homophobic stereotypes, causing great controversy between liberals and conservatives in Mexican society. And when the movie was released, it was a total box office failure: people who disagree with his position would not want to see a movie about why they are wrong, while people who do agree with him generally wouldn't like a movie that can be summarized as "two hours of gays behaving in the most gay way possible". It was so alienating and controversial that one of Mexico's two major theater chains outright refused to screen it. It also didn't help that during a TV debate with Del Toro and the director of Mexico City's anti-discrimination council, the latter outright debunked the messages of the film. A year after its release, Netflix added the movie to their service, only to be faced with massive complaints over the movie's premise, leading them to take it down after only a few days.
• Pinocchio (2002). After Roberto Benigni's Oscar wins for Life Is Beautiful, he chose to use his new clout to create a long-time dream project: a faithful adaption of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, which he would write and direct. Unfortunately, he also made the decision to star as Pinocchio, with the minimal special effects doing nothing to disguise that the famous child puppet was 50 and balding, resulting in mixed reviews but a profit in Benigni's native Italy. Then came the American dub. Realizing this was going to be a hard sell to Americans, Miramax proceeded to completely half-ass the dubbing, giving the voice role of Pinocchio to Breckin Meyer, age 28 and most famous for voicing a teenager^note The second Joseph Gribble on King of the Hill. Between the poorly synched dubbing and a middle-aged Pinocchio with the voice that clearly came from someone much younger, the American version achieved a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a parody of musician documentaries like (as the title implies) Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. However, the genre it was satirizing hasn't seen a big hit since the aforementioned film,^note Never Say Never was released five years before Popstar making the subject matter unrelevent among general audiences. This likely explains why the film did poorly enough to be pulled out of theaters after only three weeks despite positive reviews.
• The Postman: It was difficult for the marketing to explain the movie's very Boring, but Practical premise: a man rebuilding America After the End by... delivering the mail. While this actually makes a lot of sense, it takes many long moments to comprehend the idea, thus rendering it almost unmarketable. It was a massive Box Office Bomb, grossing less than $20 million on an $80 million budget.
• Radio Flyer was a Box Office Bomb for one main reason, the ridiculous and off-putting premise. Two kids have a stepfather who is abusive to one of them, but the kids cover it up because their mother loves him. So instead of telling the authorities about the abuse, the abused kid decides to build a machine and fly away. Needless to say, the problematic message (about how it's better to run away from your problems than actually confront them or even tell someone about them) did NOT sit well with most people, especially the critics that savaged the film, arguing that it sent the wrong message to kids who are actually in an abusive situation. The movie appealed to almost no one, as the subject matter was too depressing for kids, and it was too laughable and unrealistic for adults.
• Red Sonja flopped for various reasons. There were early scenes of misogynistic torture and slaughter of potential action girls — either massacred or thrown in a pit to die and become forgotten, to the point where only the protagonist Sonja and the antagonist Queen Gedren were the only women for the rest of the film. This disappointed anyone looking for a Feminist Fantasy, if not outright offending them. Fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger were disappointed to see him in a supporting role, reduced to killing mooks in only a handful of scenes^note He was supposed to have only a cameo, but the executives would elevate his role because they had no confidence in the film.. Throw in a mishmash of fantasy elements that appeal to no one when mixed together — a Kid Hero and his bumbling sidekick; a giant mechanical lizard; a topless woman that exists for no real reason; and the result was a massive box-office flop, killing off sword-and-sorcery for at least a decade, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger would later not speak good of it. Oh, and Sonja never wears her iconic Chainmail Bikini, instead donning generic fantasy action-girl attire, so even an audience wanting sleaze were disappointed.
• Revolution was a historical epic about The American Revolution... made by the British, and painting a very non-romanticized portrait of the Revolution that ran heavily on themes of War Is Hell and Grey-and-Gray Morality. American audiences, offended by the very idea of the film and expecting it to villainize the Patriots and valorize the Redcoats, gave it scathing reviews and avoided it like the plague. British audiences were no more eager to see a movie about a war that marked one of their greatest defeats, and they too ignored it. It was the first of several box-office bombs that helped destroy Goldcrest Films.
• Ride with the Devil portrays an African-American fighting on the side of Southern guerrillas in the Kansas border skirmishes of The American Civil War. Although the character had a historically factual precedent, the idea of a black soldier fighting for the Confederacy, an institution widely associated with white supremacy, was so repugnant that the film was delayed, promotional materials were destroyed, and the release was severely limited (in the actual Confederacy most of the black soldiers were slaves forced into service by their masters though, so it's not as if they were all willing anyway). Even in the film, the character possibly only goes with them because he feels grateful for another one freeing him, and suffers from constant racism by the white fighters. This ultimately resulted in the aforementioned extremely limited release of only 60 theaters and it subsequently tanking at the box office.
• Rollerball (2002): The 1975 version was a brutal, R-rated sci-fi dystopia/action film with a message against the glorification of violence, and is considered a classic. The 2002 remake, though, went through a truly epic Troubled Production^note Among other things, director John McTiernan eventually did time in federal prison for illegally wiretapping one of the producers. A well-received script focusing on the social commentary was heavily rewritten, abandoning the sci-fi setting and the commentary in exchange for attempting a Bloodier and Gorier modern sports film. Afterwards, much of the violence, gore, and nudity was reshot, edited out, and digitally censored to earn a PG-13 rating. The result was a remake hated by fans of the original, and an exploitation film too tame for exploitation fans. Reviews were savage, and the film bombed.
• Save the Tiger is a low key and highly depressing character study of a failing businessman who descends into alcoholism as he considers torching his store in an insurance scam, while everyone around him is helpless to stop his decline. Jack Lemmon strongly believed in the film but knew full well it had extremely limited commercial prospects and so took a significant pay cut to get it made, which paid off with an Oscar win in one of the most ridiculously stacked group of acting nominations in the awards' history.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World failed to find an audience due to combining too many niches together: comic books, indie rock, and video games from the '80s. Its audience would have to be a particular breed of geek that appreciates all three. Michael Cera also was not a big enough draw on his own and was in the midst of a Hype Backlash from audiences feeling he played the same character too often, something the marketing did little to dispel (keeping the most Cera-esque bits but leaving out Scott's more jerkass personality). Throw in some weak marketing (the main poster for the film was just Scott rocking his guitar, with a vague tagline of "An epic of epic epicness", leaving the uninitiated with zero clue about the movie) and an overreaching budget ($60m for a film with a narrow niche helmed by a filmmaker with a devoted but small American following) and the movie was dead on arrival, despite very good reviews from critics and audiences who did seek it out. The movie did better on home video, though, and the ever-increasing goodwill towards the film and Scott Pilgrim in general led to the anime adaptation (actually a Stealth Sequel series) Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, featuring Edgar Wright returning as co-producer and 99% of the original cast reprising their roles in the English dub.
• Sex Lives of the Potato Men, an obscure British film of the Awful British Sex Comedy genre devoted to the sexual exploits of a group of potato delivery men. This would have been bad enough, but the main characters were made to look as grotesque as possible. A raunchy comedy about hideous people having sex? No thank you. It should come as little surprise that this film actually provoked public debate over whether the British film industry was in severe decline. It didn't help that one million pounds of funding from the film came from the UK's National Lottery - needless to say, this was not the kind of "good cause" most normal people would expect lottery funding to be awarded to.
• The second Sex and the City film. Even fans were reluctant to see their favorite characters in Dubai. The Middle East, with its reputation for repressing women's sexuality with harsh punishments, did not seem like a great setting for a film about sexually liberated women, while the movie's portrayal of the Middle East was criticized as insensitive and stereotypical. The second film underperformed and was savaged by critics.
• Shakes the Clown didn't do too well in theaters, even though most people would say it isn't that bad. But it just couldn't find its niche. On one hand, it's about birthday party clowns who never take off their makeup even when not working, so despite its R-rated raunchy humor, the premise was too ridiculous for adults. On the other hand, the clowns drink heavily, sleep around (sometimes contracting venereal diseases), snort cocaine, and commit numerous acts of violence, including hate crimes against mimes - so it was too dark for kids. The result was a film that wasn't very funny and worth seeing only for novelty value (i.e., "the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown films").
• The Shawshank Redemption was initially this in its theatrical release. In addition to Invisible Advertising it had a very lukewarm reception due to being adapted from the work of an author whose primary bread and butter is horror and fantasy, as opposed to a gritty, realistic prison drama. It failed to appeal to the horror fans who loved Stephen King's works and its obscurity kept it from appealing to the mainstream. Having found a greater life on home video it is now regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time.
• Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins is particularly notable for having two overlapping yet distinct premises that contributed to a Box Office Bomb. (Not counting the fact it was released in theaters in the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
  • It’s another prequel to G.I. Joe. After the previous two films set the stage for the Joes to finally have an all-out brawl with Cobra, seeing this movie abandon that plot thread was bound to lose faith in the franchise.
  • The defining traits of Snake Eyes himself are being voiceless, faceless, and being a master Ninja. All of those traits were removed from this film’s incarnation, resulting in a far less interesting character.
• Songbird, produced by Michael Bay, takes place in a dystopian future where the COVID-19 Pandemic has worsened to the point where infectees are sent to concentration camps to quarantine, revolving around a contraband courier saving his girlfriend from being sent to one of the camps. Given that the film was released when the virus was ongoing, viewers were turned off by the premise, while viewers interested in a film about the pandemic objected to the romantic subplot and felt the pandemic wasn't handled well, resulting in the film getting critically panned.
• Speed 2: Cruise Control was set on a cruise ship, a slow-sailing vehicle and thus something that already misses the point of the title (unlike the first movie, which was set on a bus that had to keep itself fast lest it get blown up). Add that Keanu Reeves refused to return, and whoever liked the first would think the movie was unnecessary, let alone worth watching.
• Roland Emmerich's Stonewall is a 2015 film about the Stonewall riots that kicked off the modern LGBT rights movement, told through the eyes of fictional teenager Danny Winters, a Straight Gay White Male Lead from rural Indiana who bused to New York City after being kicked out of his home. Danny was created to make the story more relatable to straight white audiences, which pleased absolutely no one. Most in the LGBT community felt this was whitewashing the actual history and that it should have been about the real leaders of the riots: black drag queen Marsha P. Johnson ^note although Johnson has always maintained to not have been there when the riots began, Hispanic drag queen Sylvia Rivera, and/or Hispanic lesbian Stormé DeLarverie (of these three, only Johnson appears in the movie but her role is minor). As for straight people, the ones with enough interest in LGBT culture to even watch the movie were well aware of the criticisms, and many were also offended by the assumption that they would only care about a generic, white Midwestern boy and not the people that were actually there. Add in a 10% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and you're left with one of the biggest flops of the decade.
• The Strange Thing About the Johnsons is about a young man who rapes his father for years on end, until the latter kills himself. It's drawn controversy, not only because of the subject matter, but also because the entire cast is African-American. Some people say this adds to the story while others accuse Ari Aster, the film's Jewish writer/director, of racism.
• The Stunt Man was hated by the studio execs, who declared it to be completely unmarketable: a Black Comedy about a criminal who hides out as a stuntman on a film shoot, only to discover that the director is a lunatic who goes to quite disturbing lengths in the name of Enforced Method Acting. It took two years to find a distributor, and Peter O'Toole famously quipped years later: "The film wasn't released, it escaped!"
• One of the main reasons Sucker Punch was such a divisive movie is that depending on who you ask, it's either a Deconstruction of fanservice-driven pseudo-feminist Action Girl movies, video games, and anime, or a straight example of it that gleefully indulges in mindless violence and fanservice. To make matters worse, there's an element of Clueless Aesop to the whole thing, as director Zack Snyder happily utilizes those tropes in his previous (and later) works. The Indecisive Parody aspect came back to bite it in the ass; most mainstream audiences (especially women) were turned off because of how sexist it looked, while most nerds avoided it because it was allegedly a Take That! aimed at them. As a result, it was a complete bomb, with Warner Bros.' share of its box office take unable to offset even half of the film's marketing budget, let alone the film's actual production budget.
• The Swimmer is another one whose release was delayed for years because no one had any idea how to market it. It's a highly faithful adaptation of a John Cheever short story about a man with vague but obvious mental problems who spontaneously decides to "swim home" through his neighbors' pools, with their reactions gradually revealing what a mess his once fantastic life has become in a vicious attack on the idea of The American Dream. One can easily imagine the eventual distributor was counting largely on the Mr. Fanservice factor to get butts in seats, with Burt Lancaster spending the whole movie in swimming trunks and often dripping wet.
• Swiss Army Man is a movie about a man stranded on an island who discovers Daniel Radcliffe washing up on shore as a farting, talking corpse he nicknames Manny. This premise already drew ire from moviegoers who disliked Black Comedy and Vulgar Humor, and Daniel Radcliffe's star power was not enough to salvage what appeared to be a bizarre absurdist comedy.
• Terminator: Dark Fate put off audiences with its focus on new characters the fanbase didn't care for, continuing the trend of being a Happy Ending Override for Terminator 2: Judgment Day that made prior sequels reviled, and fans correctly predicting that John Connor would be killed off before leaks and early release confirmed it. Thus in spite of the best reviews since the third movie, Dark Fate was a financial flop.
• Terror on the Prairie sounds fairly inoffensive from the plot summary: it's a Western about an Action Girl being hunted by a group of ex-Confederate soldiers. However, that premise is almost entirely irrelevant in the face of its actual purpose, which was to be a Career Resurrection for Gina Carano after she was let go from The Mandalorian for various offensive remarks on social media, produced by The Daily Wire, a company owned by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro. That cuts out anyone who isn't at least somewhat right-wing, which wouldn't necessarily be a killer—except that right-wingers (especially the ones Shapiro appeals to) have a strong disdain for female-led action movies, especially ones where women come out on top over men^note the catalyst for Rotten Tomatoes disabling pre-release ratings and making the "Want to Watch" metric absolute rather than a percentage was misogynistic review-bombing of Captain Marvel. In short, the conflicting political issues prevent any appreciable audience from forming; liberals are put off by Carano's views and Shapiro's involvement, and conservatives are put off by the "woke" premise. Consequently, the film grossed 804 dollars in its opening weekend, handily outdoing United Passions as the lowest such gross for a film released in ten or more theaters.
• ¡Three Amigos! flopped despite having popular actors (Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Short) and directed by a respectable director (John Landis) as it has a ridiculous mishmash of concepts that don't quite fit together. It is a comedy, yet has its very serious moments (for example, El Guapo burning down Santo Poco and presumably killing many of its inhabitants), and its comedy ranges from rather grounded The Three Stooges style hijinks to farcical fantasy absurdity (the "Blue Shadows" segment, as well as the Singing Bush and the Invisible Swordsman) to the point where audiences have no clue what is what. (It did gain a bit of cult status years later, however.)
• Tideland is about a 10-year-old girl who spends several weeks in an abandoned house with her father's bloating corpse. To pass the time, she has increasingly bizarre daydreams about her Barbie heads and befriends a mentally handicapped man, with whom she practices kissing. The DVD automatically plays an introduction by director Terry Gilliam, who admits that the viewer might very well hate the film.
• Towelhead can certainly qualify. It’s a coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl who's stated to be well developed for her age (justifying the Dawson Casting along with legal reasons) coming to terms with her sexuality as she lives with her unsupportive father in Texas after being kicked out of her mother’s house during the early nineties and is raped by her neighbor and beaten by her father because of it. Plus, it’s called Towelhead. It only got a limited release.
• Trash Humpers: Grainy, camcorder footage of a trio of crazed elderly people that kill people, mutilate baby dolls, and copulate with garbage. Director Harmony Korine claims to have invoked this with the opening scene, dropping the pretensions of other art films so that anyone prone to walking out early would do so and the rest knew exactly what they're in for.
• Tulip Fever was a 2017 Period Piece romantic drama starring Alicia Vikander and the premise was tulip mania in 17th-century Amsterdam, but written more like a Lifetime Movie of the Week on a bigger budget. Historical fans didn't like the extreme liberties that were taken with the film (with tulip mania becoming more a historical backdrop than the focus of the movie the title suggested), and romance fans were turned off by the Darker and Edgier tone to the romance as it was more about pregnancy and a nunnery despite it being billed as a sex thriller and romance drama. The movie got a lot of negative reviews largely due to its hard sell and became one of 2017's biggest flops, grossing under $2.5 million on a $25 million budget.
• The Two Jakes, the sequel to the 1974 film Chinatown. As it required knowledge from the first film proper, it was alienating because the audience that liked Chinatown (especially the True Art Is Angsty crowd) found no need for a sequel and thus refused to watch it, while the audience that didn't like it were outright disgusted by the events of the first film (notably the monster Noah Cross getting away with everything and we mean EVERYTHING) and also found no need for a sequel and thus refused to watch it, and the sequel was tied to a film whose director Roman Polański was convicted of sexually abusing a 13-year old girl. It bombed and was quickly forgotten (though it still has its fans), while the first film is still remembered.
• There's a reason United Passions is one of the biggest Box Office Bombs in cinematic history, grossing all of $900 in its opening weekend.^note  No, not $900,000; really, just $900. Regardless of outside influences, an "inspirational drama" about the wealthy sports executives who started the FIFA World Cup instead of the athletes was always going to have a hard time attracting viewers. But when this movie hit theaters the week after the 2015 FIFA corruption scandal erupted and consumed all the attention, well...
• W. was always going to be a hard sell, being a biopic about a US President that was originally released while said president was still in office. Not only that, it portrays George W. Bush—who is a very controversial figure even today—as a moronic but ultimately well-meaning man who only got into politics out of a misguided attempt to make his father proud of him, getting way over his head into a situation that he didn't fully understand and wasn't equipped for, but still doing so with the best of intentions. Conservatives thought it was too harsh on him, while liberals thought it was too soft on him. Not helping matters is that it was directed by Oliver Stone, who is a very divisive filmmaker due to his outspoken political views (leading many viewers to avoid the film because they assumed that it would be biased). All in all, the film ended up bombing at the box office, received generally mixed reviews, and has since fallen out of public consciousness and remains obscure.
• Welcome to Marwen floundered for failing to be both a feel-good Oscar Bait and crowd-pleasing action movie. Trying to make a feel-good story out of Marwencol (in which a man is beaten for crossdressing to the point of being mentally-impaired afterward, with the man eventually creating a fictional town as a way of healing from the trauma) is a difficult task in and of itself. Using photorealistic CGI for the dolls of that town is something that can produce off-putting results, as the film's director can attest to with reception to some of his other movies dealing with performance capture. Adding to that are the inclusion CGI-heavy action scenes reminiscent of Sucker Punch on top of that is a good way of appealing to absolutely nobody. A lack of critical support for the movie (aside from a few performances) and subsequent awards buzz effectively doomed the movie to be a flop.
• Wes Craven's New Nightmare was a self-aware supernatural slasher deconstruction that pre-dated Scream (1996) by two years, and was released during a time when the horror genre was considered dead. It proved to be a little too ahead of its time, and had difficulty making money at the box office. The film did get good reviews though, but even today, while Scream enjoys a reputation as a landmark horror film, New Nightmare has to settle for a smaller cult following. Wes Craven even directed both films. He's also attributed the success of the latter for focusing on horror fans rather than horror filmmakers.
• What Men Want being a Gender Flip of What Women Want is already risky for both the uneven results of such an approach and how the movie was already divisive. But it tries to add in positivity with a message of feminist empowerment (a complete reversal of the original film where Nick's behavior was thoroughly unlikeable and framed as such) and also leaning into male stereotypes hard, and the movie flopped.
• White Dog is Very Loosely Based on a True Story about attempts to undo a German Shepherd's conditioning to fatally attack black people by his racist owner. The fact that we see the dog kill two black people and go after more, and in the end inexplicably seem to reverse his training to now attack white people and need to be killed raised serious concerns that the wrong message could be taken, and it was buried by the studio.
• This was the main reason that Spike Jonze's film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are turned out to be a Box Office Bomb, where its global take matched its budget (meaning the studio saw about half of what they spent on it, marketing included). Understandably, not everyone was wowed by the premise "The director of Adaptation. and Being John Malkovich tries to turn a beloved children's book into a depressing, darkly humorous fable about growing up...for adults." Lots of parents didn't want to take their children to see it, thinking that it was too adult; lots of teenagers and adults just didn't want to see it, thinking that it was for children.
• The Young Messiah got hit with this not necessarily because of the premise of the story — a Biblical drama based on the speculated early life of Jesus — but because of the fact it's an adaptation of a book by Anne Rice. Said book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, was written during Rice's brief born-again period in the mid-2000's, but by 2010, Rice had publicly denounced her faith, become more vocal about her progressive views, as well as critical of conservative Christians, making her extremely polarizing among faith-based audiences that a movie like this would normally be marketed to, heavily tainting box office projections. While receiving mostly average reviews, the movie bombed to the tune of $7.3 million against a $18.5 million budget.

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