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Presumed Flop

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Logically, not every work can be a smash hit. Many will only see modest success, while others do poorly. Some do so poorly that they get nowhere close to breaking even financially, costing the people that made them a ton of money. However, sometimes a work actually did rather well (or at least managed to break even), but somehow got a reputation as being a failure by critics, journalists, and general audiences whenever it's mentioned: that's when you have yourself a Presumed Flop. In short, it's when Common Knowledge meets a Box Office Bomb.

The reasons for this could be many:

  1. The work received scathing reviews from critics (or was Not Screened for Critics), and it's assumed that this scared people away.
  2. The work is largely seen as more beloved by critics than among general audiences, leading to assumptions that it was an Acclaimed Flop. This is especially true for older films, as Oscar Bait is a Newer Than They Think phenomenon: for a long time, it was typical for a Best Picture-winner to also be a pretty big moneymaker.
  3. Most people who talk about the work did not like it, and hence people assume it failed.
  4. It's commonly assumed that the work's premise scared away the audience.
  5. The work has been Overshadowed by Controversy, and people assume it flopped, because the controversy is all they remember about it.
  6. The release coincided with the decline of the creator or the lead actor's career.
  7. The work was just sort of forgotten about after leaving theaters.
  8. The work became a Cult Classic, so people assume it failed commercially.
  9. The people involved actually self-deprecate and fall into this trope, saying it was a flop.
  10. The work broke even, or was maybe actually a modest success, but the company behind it was upset that it did not make enough money. This is especially likely to happen if it's natural to compare the work to a smash success — a modest success looks underwhelming if it was the follow-up to a huge hit or was playing Following The Leader to a huge hit.
  11. The work had a low budget, so even if it had a small gross, it still meant it could turn a profit.
  12. If the work is the last installment in a long-running series, or a new property angling for a sequel doesn't get one, it might be assumed the lack of sequels is due to the previous installment being a flop rather than any of the production difficulties or bad timing that might prevent a sequel from being made.
  13. The work is released by a production company that is undergoing financial difficulties; if the work does reasonably well on a financial level but not enough to single-handedly save the company from its existing troubles, it might be perceived as a Creator Killer and thus a flop even if the expectation was unreasonable.
  14. Opinions of the work have improved over time, leading people to assume it failed on release.
  15. The work did fail domestically but ended up doing well enough overseas to still turn a profit.
  16. The work is Condemned by History and people assume it was always hated.

Note that a Presumed Flop is not necessarily that much of a success for the creator in the long run. For instance, a widely-derided work making you a bit of money can border on Pyrrhic Victory — sure, it sold, but your reputation has taken a hit, a sequel is likely to flop, or it might not have made enough money to justify a sequel.

Keep in mind, this is not when people hate it today when it actually was popular at the time. That's Condemned by History. This is when we claim something was a failure in its time when it actually was not. For example, the movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) is regarded as extremely offensive today, but nobody would claim it was a failure when it came out.

If it's presumed to flop before its premiere, then it's And You Thought It Would Fail.

Can overlap with Critic-Proof, which is about works that sell despite being thrashed by critics.

Note: The point of this Audience Reaction is that the work is incorrectly assumed to be a financial failure, a critical failure, or both, when any glance at box office sales or Metacritic can prove you wrong. Even if "people think it's bad" is the reason the work is believed to be a flop, please do not post a long rant about the work. Give a brief explanation of why the work was poorly received, and leave it at that.

Also note that films need to earn about twice their budget back at the box office to break even when accounting for various expenses.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Cowboy Bebop is often brought up as an example of an anime that tanked in its home country but became a huge success overseas. Except while it didn't have the lasting staying power the series would have in the West, Bebop was very well-received in Japan. In fact, it was the best-selling anime on home video in 1998; only two series sold more in that year (Neon Genesis Evangelion and the original Mobile Suit Gundam), both of which were from previous years. While the initial broadcast run was Cut Short, this was due to the show’s violent content running afoul of censors rather than poor ratings, and it would receive a full run on satellite television a few months later. The misconception likely stems from lumping it together with fellow space westerns Outlaw Star and Trigun, which premiered the same year and are examples of that trope.
  • The fact that Digimon fell out of popularity more or less at the time Digimon Frontier ended has caused the popular belief that the latter was a complete failure in ratings and sales, but it is not really the case. While the series did fail at making noise, this was (and still is) the usual for the franchise in Japan after the Digimon Adventure continuity was closed; in reality, Frontier did not do much worse than Digimon Tamers in any field, and still attracted almost twice the ratings later received by Digimon Data Squad, which was the series that finally got the franchise out of its traditional broadcaster Fuji TV.
  • The story goes that the infamous English Gag Dub of Ghost Stories was the result of the Japanese rights holders telling ADV Films that they could do whatever they want with the script as long as they kept the basic plot, as they were desperate for the series to be a success since it performed poorly in Japan. While it's true the dubbers were told they could go nuts with the script, the show actually got good ratings and reception in Japan and was reran several times. Being part of a popular franchise certainly helped.
  • The second season of the Haruhi Suzumiya anime was notorious for how much of its run was spent on painstakingly animating, functionally, the exact same episode eight times to cover the single-chapter short story "Endless Eight". To this day, it's still considered by many fans to be one of the most grueling things to marathon in anime, and in the years since, the anime still has yet to have a third season. Many assume that this season was a commercial flop because of the fans' backlash against "Endless Eight", and possibly a full-on Franchise Killer in spite of the later movie The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya being well-received both commercially and critically. However, the Japanese DVD sales tell an extremely different story: even DVD sets exclusively containing middle-of-the-arc Endless Eight episodes didn't really sell significantly worse than the rest of the series. In reality, the series' decline in popularity comes down to a combination of other factors, mainly due to the original light novel series going through a prolonged Schedule Slip (resulting in a lack of new material to adapt) along with Kyoto Animation's decision to make anime based on self-owned IPs rather than outside works.
  • Fresh Pretty Cure! saved the Pretty Cure franchise from having its plug pulled, and for a long time the Western fandom extrapolated from this that its immediate predecessor Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo! had poor toy sales and ratings that made it a near-Franchise Killer. While its viewership ratings fell short of its competitors and the concept of an Immediate Sequel Series would never again come to the main series, GoGo! actually earned decent merchandise revenue and the whole Yes! series is popular enough in Japan to get both an appearance in the Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure movie and an adult-focused spinoff over a decade after ending. Fresh saved the franchise less in the sense that GoGo! was especially damaging to the brand and more in the sense that its success confirmed to Toei that Pretty Cure had the potential to be a profitable Long Runner like Super Sentai and Kamen Rider.

    Comic Books 
  • Batman (Tom King) concluded at only 85 of its initially-planned 100 main issues, and a big rumor being pushed at its conclusion was that it was axed as a result of low sales, in part tied to its decline of quality and the tremendous backlash it became steeply overwhelmed in. While the series had become controversial, sales definitely were not a factor as Batman consistently made monthly top 15 — if not top 10 — comic book sales even up to its final issue. The actual reasoning for its premature end was that King had become occupied with other projects that made further work on it unfeasible, and he was still allowed to write his conclusion anyway in the form of the Batman/Catwoman series.
  • Nick Spencer's Captain America run, specifically after the "Hydra Cap" story; its commonly repeated in casual audiences that this was a genuinely intended "permanent change" aimed at No Such Thing as Bad Publicity but then poor readership led to it backpedalling, and that Secret Empire was a huge bomb. This didn't happen; the "Hydra Cap book", Steve Rogers Captain America was actually a pretty decent seller, and Secret Empire didn't sell any worse than any other crisis event Marvel had put out before that.
  • Similarly to Spencer's Captain America, its commonly believed and repeated that Marvel had massive sales problems during the late 2010s, specifically with their "diverse" Legacy Character line-up, with common targets for this being the Jane Foster-starring Thor (2014), the Riri Williams-starring Invincible Iron Man, the Kate Bishop-starring Hawkeye (2016), and more. Ironically, not only did these books sell decently, average-at-worst, but they actually did better than the previous runs featuring the "classic" incarnations of those characters. Though some books didn't succeed, this had nothing to do with the legacy aspect, and the rate of failure among titles was about the same between "diverse"-led titles and those featuring straight-white-male leads. Any sales issues Marvel did have during that time is more pointed towards event fatigue, the sheer number of books being produced, and a lack of promotion among the books, especially for books featuring characters who hadn't led solo titles before.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) was cancelled in 2016 after a 34-year run. The most common story about the cancellation is that the 2013 lawsuit involving Ken Penders drove away readers and led to Sega revoking the license from Archie Comics. In reality, while sales did drop around this time, the comic still continued on for 3 whole years after the incident, all while Archie was also publishing the Sonic Universe spin-off, a comic based on Sonic Boom, and a few one-shots. The lawsuit was at most one factor among many, with Archie's decision to end it also being influenced by their desire to move away from licensed titles in general and the underperformance of recent issues, in particular, the Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Unite crossover.

    Films — Animation 
  • An American Tail: Fievel Goes West is a textbook example of this. Partly due to its Tough Act to Follow status compared to the now-classic first movie, and partly because, unlike its predecessor, it wasn't directed by Don Bluth, it's widely believed that it was a box-office bomb. It wasn't, it actually made $40 million on a $16 million budget.
  • Brave is considered one of Pixar's most divisive films, especially riding on the heels of the embarrassing reception of Cars 2. At the time, it was not only one of the highest grossing animated films of 2012, but it also garnered several awards, including an Academy Award and a BAFTA.
  • Dinosaur led its production company to be shut down by Disney and is lumped along with other underwhelming cartoons the studio had made at the Turn of the Millennium. But it actually made $350 million on a $127 million budget, meaning Dinosaur was Disney's biggest non-Pixar success between Tarzan and Tangled. Still, it fell short of expectations, especially considering a big marketing budget. Additionally, it had a rival on the small screen that same year in Walking with Dinosaurs that arguably ended up overshadowing it within the pop cultural consciousness (to say nothing of Jurassic Park 3 the following year).
  • Elemental (2023) found itself sandwiched between two superhero movies (The Flash (2023) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) which made its box-office prospects low to begin with. The film's opening weekend of $29.5 million was the second-lowest in Pixar's history (only higher than Toy Story's opening weekend of $26 million which adjusted to inflation is actually $56 million and sold far more tickets). This led to several news outlets to label Elemental as a flop with Variety going so far as to write that there was "no hope of recouping its $200 million production budget domestically". However, it held on longer than The Flash with good word-of-mouth in the U.S. while thriving internationally, ultimately making a total of $494 million worldwide. The film performed particularly well in South Korea, which makes sense given Director's Peter Sohn Korean-American background which helped the film resonate with Korean audiences. It did so well internationally that it even managed to surpass Across the Spider-Verse's international box-office (if not domestic). The narrative of its comeback was so compelling that pop culture industry press held out hope for Disney's Wish (2023) later that year, saying it could come back from its poor opening the way Elemental did, but that ended up an actual Box Office Bomb.
  • The Emoji Movie is commonly believed to be a flop because people tend to assume that the premise (which was often seen as unoriginal and/or a desperate attempt to be "hip" and "modern") and scathing reviews (from critics and audiences alike) scared audiences away. Nevertheless, it made a profit ($217M worldwide on a $50M budget). It exceeded expectations on opening weekend, and opened in 2nd place ("We're number two!") against the critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning Dunkirk. Some of that was likely people seeing it out of Bile Fascination, but the studio doesn't care if you hate-watch it as long as you're still paying them.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame is notably for being the only Disney cartoon to get a Golden Raspberry Award nomination — cementing its reputation as the animation studio's biggest failure of the decade. However, despite the bafflement caused by some Misaimed Marketing hiding the movie's darker themes, it still made over $300 million. In fact, the Razzie nom was exactly "Worst Movie to Gross Over $100 Million", a quantity Hunchback barely scraped domestically, and which follow-up Hercules ended up a million short.
  • The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part has often been described as a bomb by movie journalists. Its $199 million gross was a severe disappointment, especially compared to how successful the first movie was, but it still ended up just barely earning back its $90 million budget in theaters (and toy sales put it firmly in the black). This still wasn't enough for Warner Bros. though, and they let their rights to the franchise lapse.
  • The Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi, is often written about as though it were a flop — and to be fair, it only covered half of the story. But it was actually a financial success, earning more than $30 million on a mere $4 million budget. The only reason a sequel wasn't made was because of a dispute between the studio and Bakshi over the movie's promotion.
  • My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) was ravaged by critics for being too sugary sweet, received mixed to mediocre reception from the parent show's large Periphery Demographic which it was supposed to cash in on, and led to the planned sequel to be reworked into a television special. But it made back nearly ten times its measly 6.5 million budget, for a total of 61 million dollars worldwide. It also got strong digital sales, doing well enough that the next movie My Little Pony: A New Generation was also intended for a theatrical release before the COVID-19 Pandemic moved it to Netflix.
  • Pocahontas is seen as the start of Disney's decline in the mid-90s, due to the backlash towards its Darker and Edgier tone and its liberties with history. While its profits paled in comparison to predecessors Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and especially The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas still netted $346 million worldwide. It did break their string of critical hits, but most critics only found it So Okay, It's Average.
  • Shrek the Third is often regarded as a Franchise Killer that led to the fifth movie being cancelled. While it is certainly the weakest of the Shrek films and failed to reach the heights of its predecessor, it still earned over $800 million worldwide on a budget of $160m, which is impressive for 2007 (it was the fourth highest grossing film of the year). It also wound up becoming, at the time, the third highest grossing animated film ever behind Shrek 2 and Finding Nemo.
  • The Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Movie) is the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie ever, and CostantMusic.com referred to it as "the first bona fide Star Wars flop". Except it wasn't. It earned more than seven times its $8.5 million budget, which isn't bad for what was essentially a Compilation Movie of what was originally produced as the first few episodes of the subsequent television series.
  • Teen Titans Go! To the Movies was presumed to be an Acclaimed Flop, being beloved by critics — Wonder Woman (2017) was the only DC Comics film that decade to get a higher Rotten Tomatoes score — though only grossing a mere $52 million worldwide. However, this was still enough to comfortably make back its $10 million budget, and the show would go on to have a few more direct-to-video movies. It did fail to meet its opening weekend projections though, which (based on comments made by Tara Strong before the film's release) may have squashed potential plans for a continuation of the original 2003 Teen Titans series, as teased in The Stinger.
  • The 2007 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film TMNT, which served as a Soft Reboot of the franchise, is often assumed to have been a Box Office Bomb due to being the only major theatrical Turtles film never to get any sequels (despite ending with a clear Sequel Hook). While it was poorly received by critics, it made back its budget nearly three times over. The reason it didn't get a sequel had nothing to do with its box office performance: Imagi Animation Studios, the company that produced and animated the film, went out of business shortly after its release.note  The film was also distributed by Warner Bros., who lost the rights to the franchise after it was purchased by Viacom around the time Imagi went out of business.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • While 1941 met negative reviews and failed at the US box office, international box office ultimately saved it and allowed it to turn a healthy profit. The problem was that it broke what would've been Steven Spielberg's uninterrupted run of four of the greatest films ever made, having been made right on the heels of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and before Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, causing a mediocre box-office disappointment to be remembered as one of the biggest comedy bombs of the era. To quote its co-writer Bob Gale:
    It is down in the history books as a big flop, but it wasn't a flop. The movie didn't make the kind of money that Steven's other movies, Steven's most successful movies have made, obviously. But the movie was by no means a flop. And both Universal and Columbia have come out of it just fine.
  • Spider-Man:
    • The Amazing Spider-Man 2 didn't perform as well as Sony wanted, leading them to cancel two sequels and a Shared Universe in favor of rebooting the character for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While its worldwide total of $709 million made it the lowest grossing Spider-Man movie up to that point, it still became the ninth highest grossing film of 2014, and turned a profit on a budget of, at most, $250 million.
    • Spider-Man 3 is near-universally regarded as the weakest installment of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, but it was also the highest-grossing entry in the trilogy. It only became Franchise Killer because Sam Raimi had wanted to make up for its shortcomings by making a fourth film, but resigned from the project after the studio didn't give him enough time to properly develop a script that he was happy with—leading to the studio choosing to reboot the series rather than continuing it.
  • Americathon fits the pattern of a lot of irreverent Hollywood comedies from the 1979-80 period: savaged by critics, then later gaining a cult following from cable airings, so it's natural to assume it bombed at the box office, but it was actually a modest hit, making back three times its budget.
  • Austin Powers In Goldmember is widely considered the weakest film of the Austin Powers trilogy and believed by some to be a Franchise Killer of the series in general. However, it was both the highest earning of the three films and has the highest score on Metacritic, in addition to being something of a Star-Making Role for Beyoncé's acting career. There even were talks of a fourth film shortly after its release due to its popularity, but they never went anywhere.
  • Batman & Robin, widely considered one of the worst big-budget films ever made, and a Genre-Killer for comic book adaptations until Blade and X-Men went Darker and Edgier, was actually a box office success. While it underperformed domestically, its ultimate worldwide gross was $238 million. It's often claimed that its failure dented the careers of Alicia Silverstone, Chris O'Donnell and Uma Thurman. But in truth, Alicia Silverstone was still appearing in notable roles well into the 2000s, merely choosing smaller projects because she disliked the intense media scrutiny that she got at the age of 18note . Chris O'Donnell likewise headlined three more films after Batman and Robin, and only went on a four-year hiatus from acting out of a desire to raise a family. And Uma Thurman did not, contrary to popular belief, only score a Career Resurrection with Kill Bill; while The Avengers (1998) was a bomb, that same year she was in an acclaimed adaptation of Les Misérables, and was later offered the role of Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings precisely because the execs wanted a Hollywood star in a cast full of unknowns and character actors (she only declined due to her pregnancy).
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: The movie not cracking a billion at the box office is often turned into "flop" in some discourses (generally to Accentuate the Negative with its notoriously poor reception), with some exaggeration about its breaking even point. While it had a huge drop on its second weekend and didn't reach Warner Bros.' (quite lofty) expectations, it was still the seventh highest moneymaker of 2016 and ended up in profit territory (about $105 million). Massive Product Placement contracts helped recoup its budget, similarly to the earnings of Man of Steel.
  • The Black Hole came under a lot of scrutiny in 1979 not only for being Disney's first PG-rated film, but also its attempt to Follow the Leader with Star Wars. The film's hype was undercut by unimpressed reviews from critics, and it almost immediately got branded as a failure that did much harm to the Disney brand. However, it was among the top 25 grossing films of the year, making $36 million on a $20 million budget. While it was a disappointment for Disney, it was nowhere near a flop.
  • For a region-specific example, it's often claimed that Black Panther (2018), despite excellent business worldwide, flopped in China, going in line with the tendency for films with prominent black characters to underperform there. It actually did quite well: it managed the fourth-highest debut for a superhero film in the country, and its review scores according to film sites were in the "above-average" range. Certainly not the mega-hit it was in its native country, but far from a flop—though the film's promotion seemingly going out of its way to hide the fact that it had black characters in it may have contributed to the idea that it did a lot worse. note 
  • The Cable Guy was Jim Carrey's first major misstep after his breakthrough. Yet while it managed to earn less than his Star-Making Role Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, whose budget was also smaller than the $20 million Carrey earned for Cable Guy, the final numbers were a still profitable $102 million worldwide on a $47 million budget.
  • The Descent is remembered for releasing right after the London 7/7 bombings, and largely believed to have flopped in the UK due to "nobody wanting to see a film about a group of women trapped underground", released only one day after over fifty people had been killed by being trapped on the London Underground. Especially unfortunately, this poster was on the very bus that blew up. However, the film itself was actually very successful (making over£50 million worldwide on a £3.7 million budget). Partly, this can be attributed to the fact that this is extremely cheap, but they also replaced the poster campaign, so it may be a case of misremembered controversy (and it's possible that it could have done even better — or worse — without the controversy.)
  • Dick Tracy is often said to have bombed at the box office in 1990, only to become a Cult Classic in the years after its release. In truth, it made back double its budget in the United States, and triple when you factor in the rest of the world—making it the highest grossing film of Warren Beatty's career. But while it wasn't exactly a dud, it did perform well below Disney's expectations: due to the character's iconic status, the studio had high hopes that the film would be a blockbuster on par with Warner Bros.' Batman from the previous year, possibly allowing them to launch a franchise. Accordingly, it had a massive marketing campaign, which ended up costing more than the film itself, and enormously inflated its budget in real terms. This, combined with a decades-long legal battle between Beatty and the Tribune Co. over the film rights to the original comic strip, put the kibosh on any immediate follow-ups.
  • In a case of this being called too early, many news outlets were saying Edge of Tomorrow was a flop based on the film's less than stellar opening weekend in the United States, where it managed to be beaten by, of all things, a love story about teenagers with cancer. However, international numbers were good, particularly in South Korea and China, and positive reviews and word of mouth eventually led the movie to cross the $100 million mark domestically, so it did end up making nearly a third of its profit from America ($370 million worldwide, more than double its budget); giving it a small profit and successful enough for Warner Bros. to greenlight a sequel.
  • Elysium eventually grew a reputation as a Follow-Up Failure to Neill Blomkamp's debut District 9, and yet it was incredibly profitable with $286 million worldwide and earned positive reviews, no matter if with many critics deeming not as good as District 9. The director only really derailed with Chappie, which is a lesser case as international numbers saved it ($102 million on a $49 million budget).
  • The 1981 adaptation of Endless Love was savaged by critics (and even Scott Spencer, the author of the acclaimed original novel) and spawned a major case of Breakaway Pop Hit when the title song by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross spent 9 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, so it's natural to assume that the film must've bombed, but it actually made $32 million on a $10 million budget, good enough for finishing among the year's top 20 highest-grossing films.
  • Eragon is listed among the many failed fantasy adaptations of the 2000s. While it indeed failed domestically, only $75 million, it performed adequately with the help of the international box office, making $250 million worldwide off a $100 million budget. The director even said Fox were "moderately happy" with the worldwide profits. However it was panned critically and received a great deal of backlash from fans of the books, halting plans to adapt the sequels.
  • Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the Franchise Killer for the original Friday the 13th film series before it was relaunched by New Line Cinema, so you would expect it to have been a flop. It actually turned a profit on its (admittedly very small) budget. As with the LEGO Movie 2 example above, this wasn't enough to satisfy Paramount Pictures, and they sold off the franchise shortly afterwards since it was clear it wasn't making as much money as it used to.
  • GI Joe The Rise Of Cobra got eviscerated by critics and fans of the franchise alike, with it often mentioned as a Creator Killer for director Stephen Sommers. It grossed over $300 million worldwide and, while its high production budget of $175 million meant that wasn't a huge success, it was still profitable enough to greenlight a sequel.
  • A Good Day to Die Hard was widely hated by critics and fans of the series. And yet in spite of being a domestic Box Office Bomb compliant to its Dump Months release ($67 million, less than half its predecessor), it was overall profitable with $304 million worldwide on a $97 million budget.
  • Given how bad the reputation of Godzilla (1998) is, with negative remarks from critics and fans, leading to the cancellation of a planned sequel, it is at times labeled as a bomb. It was the third-highest grossing movie of the year, profitable even with the high budget (while also moving much merchandise), and adjusted for inflation has made more money at the box office than any Godzilla film before or since.
  • Gulliver's Travels (2010) is often assumed to have been a flop. While it did bomb domestically, grossing only $42 million, it did surprisingly well internationally, ultimately grossing $237 million against a budget of $112 million. However, its domestic underperformance and the negative reviews it received would end up putting a dent in Jack Black's career for a few years.
  • Halloween III: Season of the Witch was hailed as an experiment gone wrong that ultimately led the next movie to just bring Michael Myers back. Still, like most horror movies, it was cheap and thus easily made its budget many times over ($14 million costing $2,5 million).
  • Hop is sometimes thought to have been a flop due to it being Illumination's lowest-grossing film, however it was a moderate success and grossed a respectable $184 million on a budget of $63 million. However, it didn't do as well as Illumination, who was just coming off of a megahit with Despicable Me the year prior, had hoped, causing them to scrap plans of any possible sequels and focus solely on fully-animated films instead of live-action/animation hybrids.
  • Intolerance is commonly believed to have been a flop with a massive budget that put D. W. Griffith out of business. It was actually a decent success, earning $1.75 million in distribution rentals in 1916 dollars against a budget of $385,000 in 1916 dollars (the Babylon sets did take up a third of the budget, but not the absurd amounts usually quoted). Griffith would continue making films for more than a decade, with his retirement a result of the end of the silent film era, and he co-founded United Artists in 1919. It was only when compared to the runaway success of Griffith's previous film, The Birth of a Nation (according to Lillian Gish, "they lost track of the money it made") that it seemed to be a failure; being released in the middle of World War One, just before the United States entered, didn't help.
  • James Bond:
  • The 1980 Neil Diamond-fronted remake of The Jazz Singer made back more than double its budget (while the soundtrack album was one of Diamond's biggest albums period), but the film's Troubled Production, including a delayed gestation period and the original director getting fired midway through production, then the original female lead quitting shortly thereafter, bloated its budget, so (much like Popeye) the producers publicly wrote it off as a financial disappointment. It also unfairly got lumped in with other 1980 Non-Actor Vehicle musicals (Can't Stop the Music, One-Trick Pony) that were genuine Box Office Bombs.
  • Jennifer's Body is treated as a Creator Killer for writer Diablo Cody and a Star-Derailing Role for star Megan Fox. It did earn a critical thrashing for Misaimed Marketing overtly focused on sex appeal and only later became Vindicated by History, but while its box office take was underwhelming, it was ultimately profitable with $31 million, nearly twice its $16 million budget.
  • Jurassic Park 3 is often thought of as a box office bomb and a temporary Franchise Killer. In actuality it was very successful, making back nearly 4 times it's budget and going on to be the 8th highest grossing movie of its year (a year with some stiff competition at that). What can't be denied however is that it is by far the least successful of any movie in its franchise, though considering the Jurassic Park franchise has one of the highest gross averages of any movie series that isn't a huge strike against it.
  • Kick-Ass 2 was a Contested Sequel with its lowered reception being reflected in the domestic numbers, opening at a paltry fifth place and only making back its budget with $28.8 million. Combined with earning $32 million internationally, the film was slightly profitable.
  • King Kong (1976) has arguably the worst reception of any King Kong movie, and today it is mainly discussed with regards to its massive budget and uncanny practical effects. It comes as a surprise to many then, that it made triple its budget and was one of the highest grossing films of the year.
  • The Last Airbender was intended to be the first film of a trilogy, but the negative reception put those plans on ice. However, despite the hasty conversion to 3D bloating the budget to $150m, it still broke even and became the 19th highest-grossing movie of 2010, and the highest-grossing Nickelodeon movie at the time.
  • The Little Mermaid (2023) grossed around $569 million in the global box office against a total production budget of at least $250 million, and these numbers have been analyzed by many to fit a variety of narratives, with many critics and pundits (especially those magnetized to the film's casting controversies and "Go woke, go broke" narratives) pushing the film as being a Box Office Bomb. The truth is rather hazy, in no small part thanks to hidden numbers — the claims of it being a bomb come from the general rule of thumb that a movie has to gross 2.5 times its production budget to be profitable (the initial number almost never includes marketing and post-production expenses), and thus $569 million would be well below the hypothetical $625 million break-even point. However, some insider reports estimate that the actual marketing costs for this specific film were only $140 million, alone putting the break-even point somewhere around the more generous $400 million range, and even when including other additional costs from the likes of theatre payouts, participations, and residuals (tempered by additional gains from things like home media releases and merchandising), it would still mean the movie was profitable (some further estimates taking those numbers into account put the "true" break-even point as being around $560 million, which the gross still surpasses, if only barely). While the film fared objectively worse financially than previous Disney Live-Action Remakes (many of the bigger entries with the size and marketing of The Little Mermaid were able to consistently cross the $1 billion box office mark), and The Little Mermaid would be considered a box office disappointment, signs still point to the film having made money, and that even if it technically was a loss, it would be nowhere near as monolithic and clear-cut a bomb as some critics make it out to be.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Avengers: Age of Ultron caught some flack by those who felt it didn't live up to The Avengers (2012), and sometimes this is extended to its box office... which easily broke a billion dollars and was the fifth highest-grossing movie ever upon release, only $100 million short of the original, no matter if it came between two movies that made more money. Still, this slighter downgrade in critical and financial success was one of the reasons Disney accepted Kevin Feige's request to get free from Marvel's "Creative Committee" that wasn't helping Age of Ultron and other MCU movies with their Executive Meddling.
    • Captain Marvel (2019) has a particularly vocal opposition that deems it as one of the worst of the MCU, and thus at times the film gets treated like one of Marvel's least successful entries. When it in fact it was one of the most successful, cracking the billion dollar mark with relative ease and still being in the box office top five as its eagerly awaited follow-up entered theaters.
    • Invoked by Simu Liu for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which some were dismissing as underperforming even if it was downright breaking the Labor Day opening record during a pandemic. When it was officially announced that a sequel was in the works, Simu threw shade on those who called the movie a failure by tweeting "Flopped so hard we got a sequel!!"
    • Eternals was the first movie with mostly negative reviews in the MCU, and had equally an mixed fan response. But it can't be called a full-on failure because it at least made back its money with $400 million worldwide, double its budget and only $30 million less than the better-received Shang-Chi a few months prior.
    • Thor: Love and Thunder is considered a box office disappointment because it failed to surpass the worldwide box office intake of its predecessor Thor: Ragnarok and received much worse reviews. In addition, it suffered a severe 68% drop in its second weekend, the highest in the MCU at that point. However, digging deeper into the numbers reveals that Love and Thunder earned more than Ragnarok domestically, and outgrosses Ragnarok overall when China and Russia are excluded (Love and Thunder was not released in those two countries). Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2022" tournament revealed that Thor: Love and Thunder was actually the 9th most profitable movie of the year.
  • The 2002 film The Master of Disguise was meant to be a comeback vehicle for Dana Carvey after a hiatus and be a showcase for his impressionist abilities, but ended up being regarded as one of the worst comedies ever made and derailing his career. However, it made $43.4M on a $16M budget.
  • Mommie Dearest: The movie's reputation as a punchline that ruined the career of star Faye Dunaway and prevented future adaptations of tell-all memoirs by the children of celebrities has led to the assumption that it was a massive bomb. In reality, while it was a critical failure, it was a financial success, grossing $25 million on a $10 million budget. Admittedly, this was partly due to the studio realizing that the movie was gaining a reputation as an unintentional comedy and changing the marketing accordingly.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child: While the movie has been constantly referred to as a box office bomb and is the second lowest grossing Elm Street movie, (New Nightmare is the lowest grossing movie of the series) the movie actually did do well in theaters. In fact, according to Robert Englund, Elm Street 5 was actually a hit. The movie was mainly seen as a disappointment numbers wise only because New Line was expecting it to do as well if not better then the previous movie which at the time was the most profitable movie of the series.
  • The Phantom of the Opera (2004) was largely roasted by critics and caused a schism in the musical's fandom over the changes it made to the stage version (among other things), but it did gross $154.6 million on a budget reported as somewhere in the $70-80 million range — and helped expand the popularity of the musical as a whole, a net win in the long run.
  • The 1980 Popeye film is remembered as a flop, despite making three times its budget. This might be due to its mixed reviews, Robin Williams' distaste for the film's production, and the fact that Disney wrote it off as one publicly. The reasoning behind the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards declaring it the worst film of 1980 is telling — they didn't think it was as bad as The Apple, but they took offense at it squandering far more money and hype than any other nominee.
  • Predator 2 was considered both inferior and a box office disappointment, with the original film's star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who declined to return, calling it one of the biggest flops of 1990 in his autobiography. But even if the earnings were half of what Predator made, the studio at least got their money back with $57 million worldwide on a $20-30 million budget.
  • The Prince Caspian film was declared a flop due to its box office performance leading Disney to drop The Chronicles of Narnia as a franchise, and 20th Century Fox adapting The Voyage of the Dawn Treader instead. It did perform slightly lower than expected, since it was released as a summer blockbuster and ended up competing with Iron Man, but it still grossed $419 million (nearly twice its budget).
  • The Sandlot is sometimes cited as a prime example of a film that was Vindicated by History as a classic years after its release, despite being overlooked at the box office when it first came out. While it wasn't exactly a historic blockbuster at the time of its release, it did pretty respectable business for a fairly low-budget family comedy: it made back its budget nearly five times over, grossing just under $35 million on a budget of around $7 million.
  • Saving Christmas was disliked even by the Christians who were supposed to be the target audience, and Kirk Cameron's attempts to counter critics did not help its reputation. And by being the typical shoestring budget religious film, the $500,000 cost was almost doubled in the movie's opening weekend, and the final box office take was nearly sixfold with $2.8 million.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Motion Picture has sometimes been dismissed as a flop in retrospect owing to its divisive reception, high budget and famously Troubled Production. The movie was very much profitable at $139 million worldwide against a 44 million budget: in fact, it was the highest-grossing movie of the franchise until Star Trek: First Contact surpassed it (in unadjusted dollars) 17 years later. However, its high production costsnote  led Paramount's management to cut the budget of the sequel down to about a quarter of what had been spent on the first film.
    • Star Trek Into Darkness was not as warmly received as its predecessor by fans or critics, and given that the next film had a different director and writers it's often assumed that Into Darkness must have been a box-office disappointment. In fact, it's the highest-grossing movie of the Star Trek franchise – even when adjusting for inflation, in which case it's the only one to surpass The Motion Picture.
  • Ardent detractors of Kathleen Kennedy's tenure as President of Lucasfilm often like to claim that the Star Wars films produced during her tenure have all been financial disappointments, if not disasters. Looking purely at the numbers, this is nakedly false: all three films in the Sequel Trilogy are currently among the top 20 highest grossing films in history, Rogue One made over a billion dollars at the box office, and even Solo, the first and only Star Wars film to be considered a Box Office Bomb, made nearly $400 million (it's only considered a financial disappointment because it also cost around $300 million).note  And while the films all have their fair share of supporters and detractors, they've also scored pretty consistently strong reviews from film critics, with Solo and The Rise of Skywalker being the only two films in the "Disney era" with an appreciable number of bad reviews.
  • 1983's Staying Alive, the sequel to the 1977 smash hit Saturday Night Fever, is regarded as a movie that bombed horribly and derailed John Travolta's career until a resurgence in the 1990s. Critics at the time and today regard it as a tacky, embarrassing cash-in, with absolutely none of the heart or gritty realism of its predecessor, although they admit the dancing sequences are just as well-done, if not more so. But it was not a financial failure at all: it made $65M on a $22M budget and was the number eight film of '83 in the U.S, coming in just a few million behind better-remembered hits like Octopussy and Sudden Impact.
  • Street Fighter is one of the first and most infamous cases of Video Game Movies Suck, only well-regarded by those who find it So Bad, It's Good. And can also be considered the first profitable video game movie, as it almost reached its $35 million budget domestically and easily doubled it with a worldwide take of $99 million. This may be somewhat cross-pollinated from Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Double Dragon (1994), both of which came out at around the same time (the latter only a month and a half prior) and really did bomb.
  • Fan of the Spy Kids films sometimes assume that Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over flopped at the box office, due to its story being widely viewed as a step down from the first two movies (to say nothing of its extremely dated CGI effects), which is sometimes assumed to be part of the reason why there wasn't another sequel for 8 years. To the contrary, Game Over actually had the highest box office haul of the original three movies: it made more than $197 million on a production budget of around $38 million.
  • The Sword and the Sorcerer: To many today, this 1982 film looks like a B-movie and little more than a Cult Classic, especially compared to the much, much-more known Conan the Barbarian (1982) that was released in the same year. But Sword grossed $39.1 million (from a budget of just one million) in its domestic theatrical run, while Conan grossed $39.6 million.
  • Ted 2 is commonly seen as Seth Macfarlane's second directorial failure after A Million Ways to Die in the West as it failed to capture both the critical and commercial success of its predecessor. Its also (as of 2024), the last film to be directed by Macfarlane as he seems to now focus entirely on his Television Shows. Macfarlane himself has poked fun at how Ted 2 underperformed. This all implies that "Ted 2" was a flop, and while it wasn't the success Macfarlane or the studio were expecting, it was still very profittable, grossing $215.9 million on a $68 million budget. And it seems this was enough for Peacock to greenlight a prequel series which was received much more positively.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a Contested Sequel and lumped as a failure alongside the other Terminator movies that followed it. And yet while it didn't make the huge numbers of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, T3 is the only of that movie's follow-ups that didn't emerge as a Box Office Bomb, $433M on a $170-187M budget. (Terminator Genisys made $7M more and cost less, but had the issue of failing domestically — just $89M, while T3 managed $150M with higher content ratings.)
  • Valley of the Dolls, similar to Mommie Dearest is often lumped in with other films that got reputations as unintentional comedies and flopped at the Box Office. However, despite the critical thrashing, it was Paramount's highest grossing film that year. As the film adaptation of wildly successful novel, on only a $5 million budget, it grossed $44 million! It's often touted as a Star-Derailing Role for actresses Patty Duke and Barbara Parkins, but Duke still won several Emmy awards after and saw a career downturn more due to health and personal problems (but she also served a later term as president of the Screen Actors Guild), while Parkins actively turned down other roles in favour of a more reclusive existence (as she was now financially stable thanks to Peyton Place).
  • Waterworld is remembered as a massive flop that critics hated and ruined Kevin Costner's career (or at the very least, severely stalled it). However, its score on Rotten Tomatoes is 42% (which is not great but is certainly not abject hatred), and it made $264M on a $175M budget. While that is not a stellar box office take for a movie of its budget, its reputation as a failure comes more from the constant stories of its Troubled Production than anything else. It should be noted that the film eventually moved into profit on the back of television, DVD and streaming revenue, and that nowadays the general consensus is that it is way better than people seem to remember it being.
  • Warcraft is often cited as yet another embarrassing flop in the history of video game adaptations. Nevertheless, it made $439 million on a $160 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing movie based on a video game at the time. While the movie reportedly failed to break even despite this large margin, its reputation is based on the idea that it alienated audiences and sold poorly as a result, not that it sold great but had its money poorly managed. A large reason for its reputation as a flop was that it was a commercial failure in the United States but a major success in China and other overseas markets.
  • Witchfinder General is an example of a film that was retrospectively exaggerated as a flop by its own fans to create a reputation as a Cult Classic. While it got horrible reviews from newspaper critics, who dismissed it as Torture Porn, it got quite a respectable box office in its first release. In fact, The Blood on Satan's Claw was produced specifically because the studio wanted to replicate the success of Witchfinder General.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a show with a lot of hype around it due to being a Joss Whedon production and a spin-off to the hugely successful The Avengers (2012) and the first TV series entry to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only to receive modicum reviews for the first half of the first season and a significant viewership drop. It also ended up on the wayside once the attempts at connections with the film plots stopped, and the Netflix shows leading up to The Defenders (2017) earned more attention. Because of this, S.H.I.E.L.D. gained a reputation quickly of being a huge failure that many people wrote off, despite the show's reviews sharply improving by the end of the first season and continuing to pick up after, and holding steady viewership that put it on-average with similar shows and on average with the network it was on. The "huge drop off" of viewers is more owed to how ridiculously high the viewership of the first few episodes was.
  • Carrie (2002) was intended as a Pilot Movie for a potential TV series that never got picked up. For years, the word was that this was due to low ratings. However, the ratings for the remake were actually very good, and Bryan Fuller had already started writing a second episode outline when he learned that the network simply weren't interested in a series.
  • The second half of Game of Thrones suffered an infamous case of Seasonal Rot and Audience-Alienating Ending that largely killed off its vocal, devoted fanbase. It is sometimes assumed that interest in the show disappeared completely as a result, but the Season 8 DVD still sold well (while it's admittedly possible that Bile Fascination played a role, it was unlikely to have been the only factor), and it's still one of the most watched shows on HBO Max as of 2022. In addition, Season 8 drew in more viewers than any other major broadcast show released during the 2018-19 TV season, only being surpassed by Sunday Night Football, The Big Bang Theory, and NCIS.
  • React to That was a short-lived version of the web series React that aired on Nickelodeon. A common assumption is that making a TV show regarding people watching videos didn't fly with audiences. And yet during a podcast that reminisced on the show, The Fine Brothers revealed it actually drew good ratings.
  • Supergirl (2015) suffered massively from And You Thought It Would Fail, due to an unflattering trailer and a lot of controversy surrounding its pro-feminist messaging, as well as starring a comic book character who had struggled to find a footing in the last two decades. When it was revealed that CBS were unwilling to renew it for a second season, many assumed it was because the show had been a huge failure, not helped by its subsequent Channel Hop to The CW, who had gained a negative reputation for the content they produce and especially regarding their superhero fare. However, it actually had really decent ratings on CBS, being the most watched superhero show at the time it aired (with an average of 9.81 million per episode, it was considerably higher than the Arrowverse franchise it was adopted by when it moved to the CW). The reason CBS chose not to renew Supergirl wasn't due to its lack of success, but rather the sheer expense of the show (costing around $3 million an episode), and the move to The CW was owed to the desire for a cheaper production studio.
  • The Nickelodeon sitcom Sam & Cat is often regarded as a failure, due to having lower average ratings than either of its predecessor shows, and not finishing its first season. However, it not only still had pretty high average ratings, with the lowest rated episode still managing to draw in over two million viewers at a time when streaming and YouTube had started pulling people away from cable, it also technically did finish its original first season of 20 episodes. It didn't finish the retroactively doubled season order due to various behind the scenes dramas, which were unrelated to the show's success.
  • Online critics of the new era of Star Trek all describe the newer series, particularly the first out of the gate, Star Trek: Discovery, as being total flops that "nobody" is watching. Each season that they get renewed, one can expect to read in the comments section of these announcements those same fans incredulously wondering why TV series that aren't getting good ratings keep getting renewed. The fact is that despite a very vocal hatedom, the newer Trek series are doing very well in the ratings, including Discovery consistently being at or near the top of the Paramount+ ratings chart. Some of the confusion stems from the fact that the ratings system in the era of streaming works differently than it did for broadcast television, even syndicated television, in The '80s and The '90s. Ultimately, Discovery did "only" get five seasons, but the reason for that was that Paramount+ was forced by a merger with Showtime to scale back their number of streaming series (as was Showtime), and ultimately chose to close out the series that had been around the longest and had the most seasons aired already.
  • Super Sentai/Power Rangers
  • The 1968 NBC Made-for-TV Movie adaptation of Heidi is infamous for the network cutting off the end of a close pro football game to start its premiere broadcast on time, an incident that led to the adoption of Sports Preemption rules. Because of its role in the controversy, there's a perception that Heidi itself was a ratings fiasco, but it was actually the #1-rated network show of the week, having been hugely hyped as one of the most expensive productions in the history of television up to that point.

    Music 
  • Ask anyone with a passing knowledge of Lady Gaga on the performance of her 2013 album Artpop, and most will say that it was a flop, marking the point when Gaga fumbled away her success overnight. However, in spite of lukewarm reviews and a genuine waning of mainstream interest, Artpop was her second number-one debut on Billboard selling 258,000 copies in the first week in the US, and the ninth global best-selling album of 2013 with 2.3 million copies sold worldwide. A lot of the exaggeration can be attributed to the fact that it was an underperformance by Gaga's standards. Many compare it to Born This Way and its monolithic 1.1 million American first-week sales and 5.2 million copies sold worldwide, though even that figure is misleading given that album's unusual rollout in its opening week and consequent sharp decline.note  Gaga was particularly offended by the rumor started by Examiner that Artpop led to a $25 million loss and massive layoffs at Interscope Records, a claim which was spread by many news outlets at the time despite its lack of substantial proof.
  • Girl Thing were a short-lived attempt at a Girl Group to rival the Spice Girls in 2000. People remember the extremely aggressive publicity campaign, including the girls on top of the Eiffel Tower, and the assumption that their debut single "Last One Standing" would go straight to number one on the UK charts (years later, they revealed that they even prerecorded a congratulatory interview). While the single didn't top the charts, it did get to number 8 and was certified gold. It was their second single that was less successful (only reaching number twenty-five). This led to their album only being released in Australia and New Zealand, before being quickly forgotten.
  • Similar to Girl Thing, Triple 8 were a Boy Band attempt at a Spiritual Successor to N Sync and Five. The cancellation of their album is sometimes attributed to the Boy Band craze dying down and low record sales. However, their two singles "Knockout" and "Give Me a Reason" were very successful. The former got to number eight and the latter number nine in the charts. Behind the scenes, they fell out with Polydor over Creative Differences in music styles and parted ways before the album could be released. They had even already begun performing a potential third single called "You & I" at the time.
  • K-pop Girl Group GFRIEND peaked in 2016, and everything afterwards is assumed to have underwhelmed enough. However, even if "Fingertip" was their first single not to break a million copies, it still sold a respectable half million and reached #2 in the charts. The EP Time for the Moon Night was a Sleeper Hit in the Korean charts, getting a chart reversal during their promotional period and becoming one of their biggest hits with "Me Gustas Tu" and "Rough." Their EPs afterwards sold well, and only album Walpurgis Night wound up an Acclaimed Flop for coming out in the middle of a pandemic.
  • Eminem:
    • Encore is believed to be the bad album that ended Eminem's dominance of the 2000s music landscape, as it was made during a hugely damaging and almost fatal Creator Breakdown and would face Creator Backlash a few years later. It went 4x Platinum, is one of the fastest selling albums in history, and got favourable reviews from critics (a few of whom, notably Robert Christgau and Nick Hasted, viewed it as either as good as or better than The Eminem Show). It was only seen as bad compared to Eminem's other albums, with most of the negative reviews reacting to Eminem's overexposure, the potential racism of his beef with Michael Jackson now that racist old raps of his had been discovered, and a desire for him to clear out for the hot new thing.
    • Relapse was hit with Creator Backlash almost as soon as it came out, its followup album Recovery is Eminem's official Career Resurrection, and Relapse has a reputation for being an underappreciated Cult Classic, so it's assumed a flop. However, it was met with mixed but positive reviews, was the top selling hip-hop album of 2009 (it went Platinum within eight weeks and is currently 2x Platinum), and won a Grammy for Best Rap Album.
  • There's the occasional phenomenon of a performer who had several big hits, but who's incorrectly considered a One-Hit Wonder because their biggest hit far overshadows the others. Rick Springfield had five Top 10 hits in the US in The '80s, but his sole #1, "Jessie's Girl" is the only one that gets heard anymore. The Rickroll phenomenon has made Rick Astley's #1 "Never Gonna Give You Up" immortal, but its follow-up "Together Forever" also hit #1 and he had three more Top 10s after that.
    • Hilariously, this has had the effect of people misremembering Right Said Fred as a one-hit wonder in the United Kingdom, with "I'm Too Sexy" making them completely forget about "Deeply Dippy", which topped the chart, something "I'm Too Sexy" didn't do.

    Toys 
  • The Transformers: Go! sub-franchise is reputed as a dismal failure that killed off further television content from the Japanese side of the franchise, it coming after the underperformance of Transformers: Prime in Japan did little to help this reception. However, Go! was successful among its target audience of children, and was specifically noted as a strong performer in TakaraTomy's annual shareholder meeting the year it was released. Its reputation as a flop comes from TakaraTomy deciding to focus on self-owned properties for its follow-up "kids mecha" toylines, a lack of interest from the older collector demographic, and the awkward circumstances behind its creation note .
  • The 2009 Bara Magna releases of BIONICLE are remembered for having sold so poorly that they saw the line be cut short one year into a planned three-year arc. While it did sell worse than the prior year, it wasn't that much worse, and managed to safely turn a profit. The fact was, the line's sales had been going down for a while, and didn't seem likely to reverse that trend (it was coming up on nine years old). Lego feared that if the line kept going on much longer, it might see a true flop, which would render the brand toxic in the eyes of retailers, and so decided to end it on a somewhat positive note. Indeed, the plug had already been pulled the year before, so it was more of a last hurrah than the final nail in the coffin.
  • Related to BIONICLE, a similar stigma lingered over its successor line Hero Factory. The theme was derided for its reduced focus on story, and models so similar to its predecessor, it makes you wonder why cancel BIONICLE at all. The theme was mostly ignored for a time, but it did manage to last five years, impressive for a LEGO theme, and the sets did sell right out of the gate.

    Video Games 

Video Game consoles

Video Game software

  • ARMS is often regarded as a failure, with people comparing its performance to Splatoon 2, in part thanks to Nintendo positioning the two games as sister titles. While it certainly didn't become a juggernaut like Splatoon 2, which quickly established that series as one of Nintendo's biggest new IP, ARMS still did well for itself and managed to sell over 2 million copies in its first year. While obviously low compared to Nintendo's big franchises, two million is still impressive for an experimental new IP (especially a fighting game), and on-par with the company's smaller franchises like Pikmin and Xenoblade Chronicles.
  • The fifth generation of Armored Core acquired an undeserved reputation as a Franchise Killer due to there being a lengthy Sequel Gap after the release of Armored Core: Verdict Day. Armored Core V is actually the best-selling game in the series in Japan (which has always been its primary market by far) and while Verdict Day saw a drop (which is typical of Armored Core's Mission-Pack Sequel compared to their numbered predecessor), it still moved well over one-hundred thousand copies, selling within the range of the more successful entries. The real reason for the series post-Verdict Day inactivity is that, as admitted by a FromSoftware employee during a livestream for the Taipei Game Show, the studio found a much bigger cash cow to focus on.
  • Astral Chain, the fifth collab between Nintendo and PlatinumGames, tends to be ignored in conversations about the latter's creative output, with both fans and critics of PlatinumGames tending to dismiss the title as a forgettable failure in the event that it is even brought up. However, the game sold over a million copies during its launch year, becoming PlatinumGames' third best-selling title at the time, behind only NieR: Automata and the original Bayonetta.
  • Bubsy 3D accrued a very negative perception over the years, which made it popular to claim the game was a critical failure right out of the gate. In reality, Bubsy 3D's contemporary reviews were mixed (notice how most of the really negative reviews were published long after the game came and went) and it got genuinely positive impressions from some outlets, including respected enthusiasts magazines like Gamefan. This trope caused a popular but false claim that the "Gold X Award" from PSExtreme listed on the cover was fabricated, because clearly, nobody would give Bubsy 3D that much praise, right?
  • Despite Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex getting fairly mediocre reviews and even mocked in Crash Twinsanity via a meta-joke for "not doing quite as well as we hoped", the game sold over 3 million copies on PS2 alone and made for a Greatest Hits/Platinum/The Best reissue.
  • The Darkstalkers series is often said to have been a perennial underperformer due to the series' short life and Capcom's apparent disinterest in reviving the property outside the occasional Compilation Rerelease and having its characters make guest appearances in crossover titles. While it wasn't the Street Fighter II-level monster hit Capcom's management expected from the pedigree of its developers, the games did extremely well for themselves: all of the games were in Japan's Top 5 arcade game coinage charts the year they were released, and Capcom employee Katsuya Akitomo recalls the original game as selling anywhere between 42 thousand to 48 thousand arcade boards, an outstanding number for any arcade game. For comparison, the original Mortal Kombat (1992) sold 24k boards.
  • Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze's Wii U release is presumed to be a massive critical and commercial flop due to negative reactions to the game's reveal, which admittedly had more to do with fans hoping developer Retro Studios were working on a new Metroid Prime opposed to anything about the game proper, and only managed to see success once it was ported to the Nintendo Switch years later. Not so. While the Switch version naturally sold better thanks to the larger install base, the Wii U version still sold more than 2 million units on a console that only sold shy of 14 million and received an 83 on Metacritic.
  • Duke Nukem Forever is famous for its Troubled Production that lasted over a decade, with a final product deemed so mediocre that critics and players alike considered the fact that it even managed to release after all that time to be its only selling point. Yet it still managed to make a profit in the end; since most of the development was self-funded by George Broussard, publisher Take-Two never actually had to spend much money on it.
  • ET The Extraterrestrial is widely considered an outright disaster that helped kill the North American games industry, with Atari even trying to forget it by burying copies in a landfill. Still, it's among the ten best-selling Atari 2600 games, with 1.5 million units upon release, and over 2.6 million copies by the end of 1982. What happened is that Atari greatly overestimated just how popular the game would be, meaning the same amount (if not more) of cartridges went unsold or returned, with Atari CEO Ray Kassar having estimated those numbers at about 3.5 million of the 4 million produced. This, coupled with the expensive license, was what made it a financial failure for Atari. And even the other catalyst for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, the infamous Porting Disaster of Pac-Man for the 2600, is the console's best-selling game with 8 million copies, but again, Atari overestimated how successful it would be, to the point that there were more cartridges of the game then consoles to play them.
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is often assumed by Fire Emblem fans to have been a flop that led to the series planned cancellation until the success of Fire Emblem: Awakening convinced Nintendo to reconsider, due to the Broken Base over its mechanics and its direct sequel not being localized. The handheld entry actually sold reasonably well at 52,000 copies, more than several earlier games. It was actually the underperformance of the prior home console titles, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, that caused the series' decline, though both games are popular with the fanbase. The sequel was likely passed over for Western localization due to being a DS game while the 3DS was in full swing.
  • God Hand is often cited as the game that killed Clover Studio (or at the very least, put the final nail in their coffin after Ōkami proved to be an Acclaimed Flop), being a critical and commercial disaster so bad that it prompted Capcom to announce their closure a mere month after its release. However, while its exact budget was never disclosed, what is known is that it was a cheap side-project that didn't need that many sales to break even; in fact, producer Atsushi Inaba noted when it moved 60,000 copies domestically by the end of 2006 that those modest numbers were twice what he had even expected. And in terms of the critical response, the infamy of IGN's scathing 3/10 review tends to overshadow the fact that it received mixed-to-positive reviews from almost every other major publication, with the consensus being that while it was a heavily flawed game, it made up for it with its engaging combat and quirky sense of humour. It was the sheer underperformance of Okami alone that killed the studio, and Capcom were already preparing to shut them down before God Hand had even shipped.
  • The death of the first incarnation of the Heroes of Might and Magic series is usually blamed on IV, due to its differing formula and slight feeling of being not quite finished. However, IV enjoyed mostly positive reviews at the time, and what sales data is available shows an at least acceptable performance. The real problem was that New World Computing's parent company, 3DO, was in dire financial straits, mainly thanks to debts incurred by their unsuccessful console leading to them becoming a shovelware dev, which failed to make back enough money, leading to them folding in 2003, selling the Might and Magic brand off to Ubisoft in the process.
  • The Horizon series has developed a reputation as a perennial runner-up due to Zero Dawn and Forbidden West releasing alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring respectively, with both games being heavily overshadowed in the public consciousness by their hotly anticipated rivals. Even so, they were still massively successful, with both even outselling their rivals in terms of initial sales in the UK. Zero Dawn in particular was the best-selling new IP on the PlayStation 4 at the time of release, and as of 2023 has managed to move over 24 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling game published by Sony Interactive Entertainment of all time.
  • Klonoa: Door to Phantomile is assumed to be an Acclaimed Flop by many due to its relative obscurity and poorly documented sales figures. In reality, while sales figures are hard to come by, it did well enough to launch a modest franchise that spawned six other games over the following five years.
  • L.A. Noire is believed to be a flop by some due to its lengthy development cycle and to Accentuate the Negative regarding its developer Team Bondi's mismanagement, its contentious relationship with publisher Rockstar Games as well as poor working conditions and mistreatment by the lead designer. Despite all of this, the game sold quite well. Shipping four million units in its first month alone and its sales only seem small when compared to the gargantuan sales of the other games published by Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption). However, the problematic development cycle mean that the planned Spiritual Successor "Whore of the Orient" will likely never come out.
  • Lair received mediocre reviews, becoming emblematic of the early struggles of the Playstation 3, and is frequently thought to have been a Creator Killer for Factor 5 as the company would close its doors one year after releasing the game. In a 2018 account of its development however, Factor 5's president claimed that the game was profitable; what actually killed Factor 5 was the cancellation of an unannounced Superman game (due to its publisher going bust) combined with cashflow/lending issues stemming from the 2008 global recession.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is one of the worst-selling games in the series, with fans coming to dislike it for its overly linear gameplay, excessive tutorials, and other design elements, which spurred Nintendo to create the Wide-Open Sandbox that is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in response. However, that doesn't mean Skyward Sword sold poorly in general. Despite coming out at the end of the Wii's life and being surrounded at the Fall 2011 release date with highly-hyped AAA games at the time, it still sold at a respectable count of 3.41 million units during its first month, becoming the fastest-selling Zelda game at the time.
  • LOOM never got its intended sequels and was a bit overshadowed by other LucasArts adventures, making many mistakenly assume the game was a flop on release. In actuality, it did fairly well, and a follow-up only didn't come out because the development team simply decided to pursue other commitments. In fact, it was successful enough to get an Updated Re Release, which would absolutely have not happened had it truly done poorly.
  • Mad Max (2015) had a very unfortunate release date that was shared with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and the PC release of Grand Theft Auto V, and critics ended up giving the game rather average review scores, so many people assumed the game was completely crushed by those other games. Despite this, the game still managed to sell 1.8 million copies and became a Sleeper Hit.
  • Mario Kart Tour, due to being a mobile-entry host to gacha gameplay and microtransactions, is often derided and disregarded by much of the Mario Kart fanbase. Whenever it comes up in discussion, it's more often than not referred to as being another mobile game flop for Nintendo to the point where, when the Booster Course Pass for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was announced and discovered to consist primarily of courses that were already in Tour, it was immediately assumed it was because Nintendo didn't want their work on Tour to go to waste. Except Mario Kart Tour is actually among Nintendo's few unquestionable successes in mobile gaming, being second only to Fire Emblem Heroes in revenue (and generating more money for the company in two years than Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp did in four), and received regular updates and new courses for four years after release, even after the Booster Course Pass began releasing.note 
  • Due to coming out in the middle of massive controversies against its parent company and developers, as well as a generally unimpressive reception by fans viewing it as more a patch than a sequel, it seems oddly common to believe Overwatch 2 was a flop that confirmed the original game's fall from grace. The thing is, given that it was indeed, when you get down to it, more patch than sequel, the Overwatch playerbase (which, though diminished from the game's launch, is still something many companies would kill for) largely just jumped over, and the game as a whole saw a pretty sizeable surge in new and returning players.
  • Upon release, PlayStation Home, a metaverse-style free-to-play open world for the PlayStation 3, became an unfortunate symbol of the console's turbulent early years, written off as a flop after it launched in an Obvious Beta state. In the long run, however, it was a huge financial success for Sony that developed a passionate cult fandom, such that its servers weren't taken offline until nearly a year and a half after the launch of the PS3's successor. While Sony's intent to make it a virtual community hub for all of one's games didn't pan out, it did eventually find its footing as a virtual world in its own right with its own games and experiences. Keza MacDonald, writing for Kotaku UK, even called it "Sony's most successful failure".
  • Psychonauts is often referred to as a disastrous Acclaimed Flop that only sold around 100,000 copies. However, as creator Tim Schafer noted in the 2015 documentary series What Color is the Sky In Your World?, its sales actually weren't as bad as many people reported — the game sold about 400,000 copies at the time of its release. Not great, mind you, but far from the disaster that many people assumed it was.
  • It's near universal consensus among Resident Evil fans that Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 did terribly due to their overly actionized arcade-shooter style, complete abandonment of Survival Horror, and the abysmally stupid AI of Sheva Alomar. However, 5 was not only the best-selling Resident Evil game ever until Resident Evil 7 came along, but was the best selling Capcom game ever until Monster Hunter: World came along, and 6 sold only slightly less copies than 5. It turns out completely bananas over-the-top mindless action shooters do pretty well with casual gamers.
  • A stigma brought on by way too many amateur critics is that R.O.B. was somehow a "failure" or "flop". Even ignoring the fact that R.O.B. was created purely as a Trojan Horse and successfully performed said role, R.O.B. was only sold as part of a "Deluxe Set" bundled with the Nintendo Entertainment System. While other bundles such as the "Action Set" were more certainly more popular, it still sold enough for Nintendo to keep producing for two years.
  • Steel Battalion is infamous being an excellent, but brutally hardcore mecha simulator requiring an elaborate $200 control setup, so it's become extremely common to assume that the game was a total commercial failure that only lives on through the goodwill of its critical acclaim and dedicated cult fanbase. However, according to director Atsushi Inaba, while he admitted he was incredibly lucky in the face of all the factors that would've guaranteed failure, the game did in fact sell well enough to break even.
  • Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) had a massive controversy at the time of its release regarding its monetized loot boxes which leads people to think that the game sold poorly. And while it didn't meet the planned sales expectations of EA (who were expecting 10 million copies sold but only 9 million were sold). Because DICE actually fixed the loot box issue and added continuous updates, the game is now much better recieved at its current state. With it being one of the best-selling Star Wars games of all time. In addition, thanks to a Re-release made to coincide with the release of The Rise of Skywalker, some estimates even put it higher than the much better recieved Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
  • Superman 64 is regarded as the worst Nintendo 64 game ever released, and unlike E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the critics did not become kinder to it over time when knowledge of its own Troubled Production became known. However, because developer Titus wisely didn't send out review copies until it was too late it became the top seller in North America in June 1999, then bad word of mouth kicked in and sales collapsed. Still, the game ended up selling 500,000 copies, making a profit for Titus.
  • Tekken 4 is often regarded as the Black Sheep of the Tekken series by fans, due to the many changes and slower gameplay that it had, causing it to always be unfavorably compared to its much more well-received predecessor, Tekken 3. However, the game still sold well, even if not to the heights of 3; a magazine issue reported that it was the most-successful arcade machine of the month in Japan, and the console version was at least successful enough to warrant a Greatest Hits rerelease.
  • The PS1 game based on Tomorrow Never Dies earned terrible reviews, specially by coming off after GoldenEye (1997), and is considered one of the worst James Bond games. Yet it sold well enough to be re-released among the budget "Greatest Hits" series.
  • Wario Land: Shake It! is often said to have been a massive failure, as it's currently the last Wario platformer after regular releases throughout the 90's and 2000's. While it did miss its North American launch target by some distance (which Nintendo of America wrote off as being a by-product of the 2008 recession), the game had good legs and eventually went on to sell over a million copies worldwide — outselling every WarioWare title released in-between it and 2021's WarioWare: Get It Together!, and massively so.
  • The Yo-kai Watch series is seen as being an instant flop internationally, despite the first game quickly sparking a Cash-Cow Franchise in Japan that seemed on its way to rival Pokémon. Despite not being the instant success they hoped it would be in the West, with the first game only moving 400k units in North America during its first year, the game did very well in Europe, and its North American sales were still decent enough for a handheld RPG to be deemed a promising start by creator Level 5. It was the sequels selling poorly, each performing worse than the last, which killed the franchise internationally and contributed to the company as a whole temporarily ending its operations in North America.

    Western Animation 
  • The Buzz on Maggie is one of the most forgotten Disney Channel series, only lasting a single season. You'd assume that this was due to poor ratings, as it is perceived as little more than So Okay, It's Average by many who do bother to seek it out years later. In actuality, it boasted very high ratings for its demographic in the United States and was beloved by critics. The show was cancelled because, despite domestic success, it completely failed to gain an audience overseas.
  • Beware the Batman is often seen as a commercial failure for Cartoon Network, or at the very least, a promising show they failed to capitalize on, not helped by how they openly wrote it off. However, the show did well enough that the network was considering renewing it, only to change their minds when they were unable to get a toyline deal from Mattel.
  • Many of the later shows on The Disney Afternoon are seen as failures, mainly those that only aired for one season, as Fox Kids and Nickelodeon started to lure its viewership away.
    • Goof Troop is often seen as the beginning of the end, with its competition with Batman: The Animated Series typically seen as a Curb-Stomp Battle that the Dark Knight won with ease. However, ratings data showed that Goof Troop easily held its own, and occasionally even beat Batman from time to time. Its cancellation wasn't because of any ratings issues, but rather due to a combination of its high production costs, the brief dissolution of Disney's partnership with ABC (which aired the show on its Saturday morning lineup), and an overall drop in ratings among kids' demographics that year.
    • Bonkers is regarded as trying and failing to take on Animaniacs despite the fact that, in most big markets, its direct competition was Batman, which was an entirely different kind of series. Rather, Disney's decision not to make any more episodes beyond the initial order is likely more because of its Troubled Production than anything else.
    • The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show is often lumped in among the failed attempts to capitalize on the success of The Ren & Stimpy Show. Yet evidence shows that it did fairly well as far as syndicated cartoons were concerned. The more likely factors leading to its present day obscurity are Disney suddenly choosing to bury it just before its premiere, likely a result of shifts in Disney's corporate management as a result of Jeffery Katzenburg leaving the company to found DreamWorks SKG the year before, as well as it being the only Disney Afternoon show to air only once a week throughout its entire runnote , not to mention Disney Channel never airing it outside of special airings to promote its less widely available sister network Toon Disney.
  • Invader Zim was cancelled halfway through its second season, leading to the assumption it was an underperformer. On the contrary, ratings were actually fairly decent. The show was just too expensive to produce relative to the ratings, with said ratings also mostly consisting of viewers outside the network's target demographic of 6-to-11 year olds.
  • My Dad the Rock Star ended after two seasons with 26 episodes, with people thought that the show was canceled as the show's episodes are not memorable. But it actually had great ratings and views when the show was airing on its origin channel. The only reason it was canceled was because Gene Simmons wanted to focus more on different projects.
  • Sym-Bionic Titan was canceled after one season and was later written off by Cartoon Network, effectively preventing it from re-running on the network. It was originally believed that it was due to being unable to garner a toy line, but it was later revealed that this was only partially true. The show saw a demographics mismatch similar to Invader Zim above: good ratings, but most of the viewership weren't the target demographic, meaning the show wasn't getting much in the way of ad revenue to help fund the production. Executives thought that toy sales would be just enough to push the show into profitability, which is where the "couldn't sell toys" claim came from.
  • Shadow Raiders was cancelled after just two seasons (despite the creators having plans for a third season), leading many people to assume that it was axed due to low viewership. According to most reliable accounts, however, it got solid ratings throughout its run, and was considered a success. It was actually cancelled because Trendmasters' War Planets toys (which the show was originally intended to promote) weren't selling well enough to justify keeping it in production.

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