So, how can you tell when a movie has bombed? This depends on several factors. First is how much the studio paid for production, paying all those people and companies you see in the credits at the end, which is generally public information. How much the studio paid for marketing is also important. That budget is generally not public information but is generally a significant percentage of the film's overall cost. A $150-million production may well have had $75 million spent to advertise it. Furthermore, since movie theaters don't just show movies for free, a portion of every ticket sold goes to supporting the theater itself. And of course, if the film is based on something, like a video game or a comic, somebody's got to shell out for the rights to use the names and setting, and that can really rack up the bills. Put these together, and you can see that a movie mustn't merely cover its budget but probably needs to make at least twice that before it can begin paying for its marketing costs, much less become profitable.
A common objection at this point is to bring up the international revenue. After all, the film made several hundred million more than its budget around the world; clearly these studios just want us to think only America matters and the Hollywood press keeps buying it! Right? Well, actually… not really. Or at least, not always. While the rest of the world is a much bigger market and can rack up film returns in the billions, behind these numbers, overseas distribution is actually a lot less profitable for the studios themselves. Like with domestic theaters, foreign theaters need to make money off of ticket sales, and they're more inclined to support movies made locally as opposed to internationally produced films. As such, films shown overseas will often see even less of a return than the domestic gross and may have additional costs like needing a local dub track. How much the international box office helps can also vary depending on the country in question. So studios still count on covering their costs domestically and judge a movie accordingly. While it's possible in practice, aversions tend to be from marginal cases. Around the world, taste in American movies tends to favor the same films, and the biggest hits at home are also the biggest hits around the world.
Good further reading on how much movies need to make can be found here.
Commonly cited possible reasons for box office failures:
- Misreading the market: Probably the biggest reason behind a fail is that it's just plain hard to know what people will like. Worse, what the public likes changes all the time. Something that was innovative two years ago when you tried to Follow the Leader and hit greenlit is now a tired old cliché nobody will see. Maybe you underestimated the audience... or overestimated them, or maybe you don't even know which audience you want to attract. Sometimes it's the faulty formulas in market analytics that can give misleading information. The point is: sometimes even your best efforts fail.
- Bad word of mouth: Sometimes a movie does poorly because everybody's just expecting it to be a bad movie - maybe it's a sequel to a bad film, or it's in a genre that the director isn't known for, or it might involve a director/actor/producer who turns off viewers for one reason or another, or it's assumed to be a rip-off of an older movie, or a remake, or another Continuity Reboot, or the trailers were terrible... and often people just don't want to go to see a movie that they aren't sure they'll enjoy. This doesn't mean the movie is bad, just that enough people think it is to cause the movie to fail.
- Competition: This is particularly often in effect with summer blockbusters. People have a limited amount of brainless action they would watch, and if there's a lot of that available, some titles may be neglected. They also tend to be high-budget, and as such if the movie flops, it costs a lot. There is, however, often a principle similar to Award Snub in nature: several good movies (with similar target audiences) are released simultaneously, thus one of them performs truly spectacularly, another one flops, but both are considered great in hindsight (the hit E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the flop Blade Runner, for example).
- Poor marketing: Many a bomb became so despite (or due to) being an excellent movie in general. Incorrect or misleading information about them (or just plain lack of marketing) makes audiences rely exclusively on word-of-mouth, which is generally not enough for a movie to successfully perform. The internet has made this situation a bit better, but not that much. These movies almost always achieve cult status and can later become profitable on DVD.
- Poor budgeting: With the amount of money spent on big releases, this is an increasingly large risk. Even good movies can effectively fall down at the box-office if they cost too much to make. Tens of millions are spent on special effects that last a few minutes or sets that will inevitably be blown up, an actor's paycheck is extortionate, and if it all costs too much, you're going to reach a point where no matter how good a movie is, it just can't make back what was spent on it. The creators can only hope for good DVD sales and reviews and take home a little lesson for next time.
- Limited releases: Many independent films are released in less than a few hundred theatres in the USA, which makes it very unlikely for expensive indies to recoup their budget. Also if the movie was released direct-to-video in one territory.
- The movie sucks: Let's face it. For all the other reasons a movie can bomb, sometimes a movie fails because it's just bad. The story, editing, acting, it all sucks. Somebody put a lot of money into this thing, and man, was that a terrible idea! Maybe the director was phoning it in, or he made poor creative choices because he was blinded by his ego. Maybe the producers were so bombed out of their skulls on coke that they never stopped to think if making the movie was a good idea in the first place. It failed, sucks to be you, better luck next time...if there is a next time.
- Issues with people making the movie: Maybe the director or headlining actor made a derogatory comment that leads to a boycott of the film. Usually movies with larger budget can get away with it but independent films are much more affected.
- World events: Sometimes movies flop due to something that's not directly related to the movie itself or the movie industry as a whole. For example, the first film to lose over a million, Intolerance, came out at a time when its anti-war sentiments (which were widely held just months earlier) were going against the popular pro-war wave of late 1916 in the middle of World War I. Disaster movies' sales tend to be hit very hard when bad timing happens thanks to those films appearing to be Harsher in Hindsight; the September 11th attacks and the Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, killed a lot of those even though they were obviously filmed prior to the catastrophes. The same effect involves comedies lampooning airports, airlines and the security process, which all brought down the film adaptation of Big Trouble, which was bumped to the Dump Months from its original position ten days after the 11th. Another example of unfortunate timing is if a genre is killed prior to release. Finally, changes of laws and polices can get the movie banned in countries where the significant (or even main) part of the intended audience reside.
- More recently, the COVID-19 Pandemic forced many theaters to shut down all over the world (China shuttered in January 2020, and most other countries followed suit through March and April 2020); films such as Bloodshot and Pixar's Onward suffered from it so badly that major studios temporarily halted reporting box office numbers. Several tentpole films even had their release dates changed when the pandemic hit since almost nobody would be going to the theaters any time soon, and films that couldn't do so ended up getting early digital releases. Tenet was the first high profile theatrical release to occur during the pandemic as theaters started reopening in limited capacity, and ended up a valiant failure. Another situation regarding box office during the pandemic is the enforcement of health passports requiring either vaccination or negative PCR tests to be allowed access to theaters in some countries — even some highly advertised films like The Suicide Squad outright tanked the very week that passport was enforced in July 2021 in France for instance, and box office in general has been slashed by about half in the country since health passports are required. As of the post-pandemic times, while some commentators have said that "box office has recovered" looking at the success of some big tentpoles (No Time to Die, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water) the truth is that audiences have been bottlenecked towards "big IP" things like them, leaving little to lower/medium budget productions and more mature audience-skewing pictures (a phenomenon that was already at play before the pandemic but got dramatically increased by it) and causing such entertainment to increasingly gravitate directly towards streaming platforms and PVOD.
According to The Other Wiki, the biggest bomb of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records (before the category was retired), was the 1995 swashbuckling action-comedy Cutthroat Island, which lost $105 million. This catastrophic failure, coupled with the infamous Showgirls, instantly crushed Carolco Pictures as a result.
The current largest confirmed loss is Strange World (2022), with a $197 million loss, while John Carter (2012) has the highest upper estimate, with $200 million. Before inflation.
After inflation, Mortal Engines (2018) has the highest confirmed loss, at $204 million (2023). Carter still has the highest upper estimate, at $255 million (2023).
