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    Anime movies 
  • The Aikatsu Stars! movie suffered this trope due to being released during Obon, which is a very important holiday for Japanese families and opening on the same weekend as The Secret Life of Pets. On most of the weekends following opening weekend, multiple typhoons hit the country, keeping many families in their houses for the weekend as weather conditions were unsafe.
    • The same problem plagued the movie of fellow Bandai property HappinessCharge Pretty Cure! two years prior, which opened at number 5 and earned 100,000,000 yen due to Typhoon Vongfong.
  • At the end of the preshow shown during the Fathom Events screening of Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F', previews were shown for other Funimation films that would get released on a nationwide scale, including Shin Godzilla, The Boy and the Beast, Psycho-Pass, both parts of Attack on Titan and Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie. Of these films, only Attack on Titan was released nationwide. However, said release had a subtitling error which got so much backlash that Funimation wound up canceling their plans for the remaining four nationwide releases.
  • Love Live Sunshine: The School Idol Movie Over The Rainbow got a horrible case of this. Not only did it open in less than half the theaters of its predecessor, it also opened on New Year's weekend, which is the most important holiday in Japanese culture and also is a time when many children get a two-week-long break from school. The result was that the film opened at #8, curb-stomped by Ralph Breaks the Internet, Dragon Ball Super: Broly and Kamen Rider Heisei Generations Forever, all of which were aimed at a child audience, as well as the wildly-popular Bohemian Rhapsody.
    • The American release only happened in a handful of theaters despite being advertised to be in a good number of them like My Hero Academia: Two Heroes and Your Name were.
  • Both Shimajiro movies were this: The first was released the same weekend as that year's Doraemon film and the second Pretty Cure All Stars New Stage movie and the second was released the same exact week as Frozen, which had a 16-week reign at the top of the box office. Both wound up totaling 116,000,000 yen in ticket sales. Box Office Mojo doesn't even list either movie in any list at all for this reason. The films after Shimajiro and the Whale's Song were released only to Aeon theaters as a result, with the exception of the 30th anniversary film Shimajiro and the Rainbow Oasis, which also failed at the box office against that year's Doraemon film and Coco.
  • Tobidasu PriPara: Aim For It With Everyone! Idol Grandprix, despite the success of the first PriPara movie half a year before, was only screened in fifteen theaters in the entire country because Avex Pictures did not think it would do that well since they saw it as a quickly done cash-grab for its 3D gimmick. Combine that with the film being released on the same day as Pan and the Go! Princess Pretty Cure movie and the movie didn't gross as much as the two films based on the franchise that followed it or its predecessor.

    Dimension Films/The Weinstein Company 
  • Dimension Films does this more than any other film company — they chopped 20 minutes off of The Crow: City of Angels, (most of which were character development scenes and very important plot points) then they released The Crow: Salvation Direct to Video after poor test screenings; they cut the planned 2000-plus-screen wide release of Equilibrium down to less than 300 screens because the film was already in profit from international distribution deals and spending money on additional prints or advertising might have ruined those profits; they shelved films like Texas Rangers and My Boss's Daughter for over a year with little explanation. Some films, like Venom (2005) and DOA: Dead or Alive were barely advertised at all and given a very limited release. And releasing Scream 4 during the Easter period while all the others were kept for winter (and notably giving it little publicity outside North America — tellingly, this was the only film of the series where none of the cast did any British promotion, although Hayden Panettiere did go to Germany for that purpose)? Bad move.
  • Dimension Films asked director David Twohy to recut his film Below so it could get a PG-13 rating instead of an R. Twohy refused, and Dimension retaliated by giving it a limited release with almost no advertising, all but guaranteeing it would bomb. And bomb it did, only taking in $605,562 on a $40 million budget. If that wasn't enough, when they released it on DVD they jacked the price up so video retailers wouldn't bother stocking it. Twohy has not worked with Dimension Films since.
  • The indie horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane got screwed out of an American release when the Weinstein Company, which had spent three million dollars for the rights to it, suddenly canceled its planned 2007 release after seeing the disappointing box office returns of Grindhouse and other horror films early that year. They sold the rights to Senator Entertainment US, which has since gone out of business, leaving the film in limbo. Fortunately, this tale has a happy ending — the film was released in Britain, where it made back its budget two-and-a-half times over and Weinstein Co. FINALLY managed to get the rights to the film back in 2013; it got a limited theatrical release in the US in October of that year.
  • Harvey Weinstein was in charge of the international release of Snowpiercer, and tried to have the film edited heavily to appeal to American audiences, including editing or removing twenty minutes of footage and adding opening and closing monologues. Director Bong Joon Ho refused, meaning the film initially only saw a very limited release before critical acclaim and viewer demand led to a wider uncut release.
  • The Weinstein Company screwed over the Miley Cyrus film So Undercover by pushing it back several times since it was completed in 2010; finally, it got a release date of October 5, 2012, only for that to be changed to a Direct to Video release. (However, it did get theatrically released in some overseas territories.)
  • Weinstein also screwed over Underdogs by moving its release date August 27, 2014 to January 16, 2015. Then, it was moved from January 16, 2015 to April 10th, 2015 so that they could release Paddington (2014). After that, they moved the release date from April 10th, 2015 to August 14, 2015 to avoid competition with Furious 7. The week before the scheduled release date, it was pulled with no explanation whatsoever, which was a bad move on their part since the only kids' movies in wide release at the time were Shaun the Sheep Movie and Minions.

    Lionsgate 
  • Absolutely Anything was supposed to get a wide release in 2016, but wound up being not only pushed to May of 2017 but it also only got picked up by 106 theaters and premiered on the same weekend as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, resulting in a $21,000 dollar total gross in the US. note 
  • Chaos Walking (2021) was an unusual case of a tentpole film getting dumped by its studio. It was intended to kickstart a blockbuster franchise with an $85 million budget, but when filming finished in late 2017, the film was doomed when poor test screenings and an executive-shuffling at the studio came in, with the new regime having little interest in salvaging it beyond spending $15 million on reshoots. After said reshoots ended in mid-2019,note  Lionsgate wouldn't release it until March 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic and gave it Invisible Advertising, resulting in the film only grossing $3.8 million in its US opening weekend; so badly was it left to die that within that same week, it was reported Lionsgate wrote off the entire budget as a loss on their taxes.
  • Lionsgate (through Summit Entertainment) decided to release Early Man on the exact same weekend as Black Panther, resulting in it having the third-worst opening for an animated film of all time in the United States after All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 and Teacher's Pet. It also did poorly in its home country of the United Kingdom due to it being released the same weekend as Coco. Tellingly, Aardman sold the international distribution rights to their following films, beginning with A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, to Netflix (at least, in several regions).
  • The Miley Cyrus film LOL was demoted to a limited release after a year in Development Hell. To make matters worse, they released it the same weekend as The Avengers, which had the then-largest box-office opening of all time. In fact, the studio didn't even do promotion; they gave those duties to its home video arm.
  • The Midnight Meat Train was supposed to get a wide release in 2008, but Lionsgate only ended up releasing it in the secondary market to dollar theaters on a grand total of 100 screens, and the film didn't even make back a quarter of its 15 million dollar budget. Clive Barker was outraged at the poor treatment, claiming that Lionsgate shortchanged the film in order to focus more attention on films like The Strangers (which Barker produced).

    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists 
  • One of the earliest examples known of this happening in film was Erich von Stroheim's silent masterpiece Greed. It was dumped with almost no advertising by MGM on its opening day, instead leaving those duties to William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. The film was poorly received and was an instantaneous box office failure. Historians blame MGM's poor micromanagement and their falling out with Stroheim on the film's poor performance, as they had removed at least seven hours of crucial footage from the film (the original cut was nine hours long) and trimmed it to two hours, leaving the film a complete mess and with numerous plot holes unresolved in the process. Since the film is held in a higher regard today than at any point in history (thanks, in no small part, to Turner Classic Movies' four-hour restoration of the film that tries to be as faithful to the original cut as possible with what little surviving footage they had), this is perhaps the most tragic example of being a film being Screwed by the Studio.
  • The 1992 film adaptation of Of Mice and Men was released to just 398 theaters and grossed only $5.4 million in its run. Since the film was well-received and is regarded as one of the finest adaptations of the original novel, one can scratch his or her head wondering what prompted MGM to think the film wasn't worth it.
  • Once Pumpkinhead was finished the real trouble started, as Dino De Laurentiis' DEG, who were behind the production and release of films such as Evil Dead 2, Blue Velvet, Maximum Overdrive, The Transformers: The Movie, Near Dark and others, went bankrupt before it could be released. This resulted in it being bought by United Artists/MGM, who didn't do much at all to promote the film, barely putting it in theaters as they put much of their effort in promoting their own horror film, Child's Play, which they apparently put Pumpkinhead on a double bill with. Ironically, they ended up giving up the rights to Child's Play to Universal after the first film. This lack of promotion led the film to languishing in obscurity in theaters, but it did find a life on home video where it gained its cult following.
  • Rock and Rule was initially a co-production between Canadian animation studio Nelvana and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and things seemed to go well early in production. However, when the film was halfway through, MGM had merged with United Artists. Thanks to the executive shuffling that followed, the old management was gone, the new management had no idea what they were co-producing, and decided the film wasn't worth their time or money. To celebrate, they ordered Nelvana to make dozens of changes to the American release, most notably recasting Omar from Greg Salata to Paul Le Mat (of American Graffiti fame) and changing the film's title to Ring of Power for releases outside North America. In the end, MGM just added salt to the wound by choosing to give it a limited release in Boston with absolutely no promotion. It grossed only $33,000 against an $8 million budget, making it one of the biggest animated box office bombs of all time.

    Netflix 
  • Back to the Outback's trailer promised that the film would be screened in select theaters. However, in the United States, most theaters that showed Netflix films passed on showing the film in favor of The Unforgiveable.
  • The Mitchells vs. the Machines was supposed to get a nationwide cinema release. Due to reasons unknown, not all theaters that released Iconic Events releases in the past got the movie. Approximately 130 theaters got the film unlike most event cinema releases of a similar scale, which usually come to 300+ theaters. Even the director was aware of this, and hinted that there might be more showings in the future.

    Paramount Pictures 
  • Paramount screwed The Adventures of Tintin (2011) in the US by choosing to open the film on the same day as the expansion of another Paramount title, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. While Mission: Impossible got trailers months in advance, a large IMAX push, heavily-promoted advance screenings, and deluxe treatment by Paramount, Tintin was treated as an afterthought (granted, the character and his comics never caught on in the United States) with a light marketing push, limited awareness, and the cancellation of IMAX evening showings. All despite having none other than Steven Spielberg as director and the premiere of the trailer for The Hobbit on select prints. As a result, Tintin was outgrossed on opening day by the third Alvin and the Chipmunks film. The good news here was that the international release was far more successful.note 
  • Paramount had utterly no faith in Annihilation, giving it a single trailer and little marketing while setting the release date just one weekend after the smash hit Black Panther (2018). Even though the film wound up playing great with critics, the studio also failed to hold press screenings that could have helped word of mouth spread earlier, only lifting the embargo a day before release. Finally, in a bid to mitigate potential losses, the studio sold distribution rights (outside the United States, Canada, and China) to Netflix, despite protests from both the film's creators and eventual audiences that it was meant to be seen on a big screen. With such confidence behind it, it's hard to believe the film only did $11 million on its opening weekend and will struggle to match its $40 million budget — meaning the film will not recoup its costs in North America, while any profits from the Netflix deal comes at the cost of strengthening a competitor's brand with an acclaimed prestige studio title.
  • The 1992 slapstick comedy Brain Donors (a modern-day Three Stooges-meets-The Marx Brothers-style farce starring John Turturro) was originally produced by David and Jerry Zucker as Lame Ducks for Paramount. However, when the Zuckers left for another studio, Paramount scrapped the planned publicity campaign, changed the title, and withdrew the film after its initial screenings. It sank into obscurity and has since developed a cult following due to the VHS/DVD releases.
  • Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away is a good example of boneheaded thinking when it comes to releasing a niche production (a 3-D Movie compilation of Cirque live show highlights brought together by an Excuse Plot). Paramount released it during the crowded Christmas 2012 period — on the same day as another Paramount release, Jack Reacher, to be exact! And unlike that Tom Cruise vehicle, the Cirque film didn't get a big ad push; given the film's no-star cast, they may not have known how to promote it beyond a trailer, poster, and a TV spot or two. To make matters worse, it only managed two showings per day on the 800-or-so screens it reached in North America, as it was forced to share space with other films. Paramount might have sacrificed better exposure for Worlds Away in an effort to keep Rise of the Guardians — a far more expensive family film that they were distributing for DreamWorks Animation and had surprised the industry with its box-office underperformance — on screens through the season. And to their credit, they did manage wide exposure for Worlds Away’s DVD release the following spring.
  • Friday the 13th Part III has had a bizarrely poor treatment from Paramount despite being one of the most important films in one of the studio's biggest franchises. The film was originally shown in 3D, and nearly every scene in the film is designed to take advantage of this, with weapons, blood, body parts, popcorn, yo-yos, and juggled fruit all flying at the camera. However, for some reason, the movie has never been given a remotely competent 3D home video release. Both the DVD and Blu-ray releases use the old-school anaglyph (red and blue) 3D system, which can be used very effectively... but both versions suffer from a number of downright amateur encoding issues that result in nauseating double vision with little to no 3D. Now that the 3D Blu-ray format, which is far superior to anaglyph, has become commonplace, fans have been waiting for Paramount to give Part III that treatment, but it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen, leaving the film a nonsensical mess of things flying at the camera in 2D.
  • The later G.I. Joe films were victims to this:
    • Paramount abruptly postponed G.I. Joe: Retaliation to March 2013 (after TWO Super Bowl spots no less) when its plum July 4, 2012 weekend release date was only a month away, for two reasons: 3-D conversion (to earn more money) and re-shoots to give Channing Tatum more screentime (while it might lead to Character Development, it is cashing in on a rising star's name). Fans did not take this well to say the least. The studio got what it gave for this decision — since Retaliation was their one "self"-produced tentpole movie for summer 2012 (The Avengers and Madagascar 3 respectively being distribution-only efforts for Marvel Studios and DreamWorks Animation note  neither of which they would see the bulk of the grosses on; hell, even Retaliation was a co-production between Paramount, Hasbro Studios, Skydance and MGM), it effectively left them with a hitless summer.note  For all that, it actually did well at the box office when it finally came out in the spring of 2013, but who knows how much better it might have done had things gone as planned?
    • Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins had an even worse go of it, releasing in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and seeing a drastically lesser promotion than planned, mainly because of Paramount using it as a replacement for Top Gun: Maverick after moving it out of 2021, and ultimately the film crashed and burned at the box office as a result of the burial and bad reviews (which admittedly didn't stop the first 2 films), only making $40.1 million altogether, less than half of a budget estimated as high as $110 million. Combined with outside factors such as Paramount focusing more attention on their streaming service Paramount+ and co-producer MGM being bought out by Amazon, this may put the already-on-life-support G.I. Joe franchise into a deep freeze, for a moment at least.
  • God Particle was a science-fiction film set to come out in early 2018. Fearing a bomb, Paramount ultimately took the film to J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot, who shot additional scenes and reworked the film into The Cloverfield Paradox, and then the studio sold the film to Netflix, who then debuted it immediately after the Super Bowl. note 
  • Paramount did this to Hugo after picking the film from Sony Pictures (due to the film's producer/co-financer wanting to open the film on Thanksgiving and Sony wanting Arthur Christmas for that spot). Examples include: mismarketing the film as either a comedy or an Inception-style thriller, barely marketing the film before the release, reducing the film's theater count from 3,000 theaters to just 1,200 a week before opening and choosing to go with a quiet expansion rather than spreading awareness. Not even the film's massive critical acclaim and awards nominations and wins helped Paramount change their minds.
  • Paramount canceled the United States release of The Little Prince just a week before its scheduled release, making it one of the most abrupt release cancellations ever. Paramount allegedly feared the film would not hold out against either Zootopia (which was a massive hit) or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (which was scheduled for release the week after The Little Prince's canceled release), and would've served as another box office bomb in Paramount's history booksnote . The distribution rights were eventually picked up by Netflix on the week of its intended release.
  • The Lovebirds was initially dated for an April 2020 release, but it (like most theatrical releases dated for around the same timeframe) got pulled in March of that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic threatening large gatherings. However, Paramount didn't bother with finding another release date and, like with Annihilation and The Cloverfield Paradox above, dumped the film to Netflix instead.
  • Silence, a long-gestating passion project from Martin Scorsese, got a piss poor release in the States. Rather than have a 2017 release (Scorsese just finished editing two months before release), due to awards potential, Paramount gave it a Christmas release, had it playing in fewer theaters than the other awards contenders, and gave it minimal advertising. Even when they expanded the number of theaters later on, it was too late and the film became a flop.
  • Sponge Bob Squarepants:
  • Star Trek: Nemesis was so botched, that Paramount basically sacrificed it to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, knowing it didn't have the remotest chance of competing with that movie. Curb-Stomp Battle doesn't even begin to describe how this film fared in that little competition. This, combined with bad word of mouth (the movie performed dismally even taking its competition into account) basically turned the movie into one of the most notorious flops of any major release and killed the TNG film franchise.

    Sony Pictures (Columbia/TriStar/Screen Gems) 
  • Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a rather infamous example of this. It was greenlit by Columbia Pictures, then under the management of eccentric British producer David Puttnam, who wanted to make Columbia the anti-Hollywood of the Hollywood studios and flopped miserably. Puttnam eventually resigned while Columbia cleaned house and hired new management who didn't care about the remaining Putnam films, so Munchausen — which had a Troubled Production, sadly typical for a Gilliam film, resulting in an over-$46-million budget to make back — was dumped into 117 North American theaters with next to no publicity. It made only $8 million in the end. It still managed a few Academy Award nominations for its technical strengths (though it didn't win any) and did well with critics; today it's considered one of Gilliam's best films.
  • Attack the Block was dumped into just 11 markets with almost no advertising by Screen Gems despite having mostly excellent test screenings and word-of-mouth. Supposedly, Screen Gems wanted to build Paranormal Activity-esque hype around the film but their choices of theaters was completely random, and entire markets were shut completely out. There was also no website that listed when theaters would be getting the film.
  • The Sam Peckinpah western Major Dundee was taken out of the eccentric director's hands after a troubled shoot, before certain crucial scenes could be filmed, and released with a score he didn't like and missing what key character-focused footage had been shot. A 2005 recut of the film provided a new score and restored what lost footage could be found.
  • Part of the reason Muppets from Space bombed was because it was originally made with a February 2000 release in mind. Sony, however, wanted another hit for their summer 1999 slate alongside Big Daddy. So quick was the change that the advertising budget was cut, to the point where by the time the film premiered there was not as much attention for audiences to turn out. Being released alongside Hollywood legend Stanley Kubrick's parting gift, Eyes Wide Shut, did not help.
  • Othello was a bad example of the trope, being run in a crowded market (that included Sony's own Jumanji and Toy Story, among others), but even more shocking was the theater count: not only did it only show in two theaters on opening weekend, the widest release for the movie was less than three hundred. As a result, it only grossed $2-some million on an $11 million budget, despite generally receiving favorable reviews from critics.
  • Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville the long-awaited sequel to The Last Picture Show, is another example of getting "Screwed by the Studio" (and Bogdanovich actually used those words to describe it). Columbia Pictures was supposed to re-release Picture Show — which was rarely shown on TV and unreleased on video at the time — prior to releasing the sequel, a promise that was later reneged. Originally 2½ hours, Bogdanovich cut 25 minutes off of Texasville, predominantly scenes that would have not made sense to a viewer that had not seen the earlier film. To make matters worse, Columbia subsequently dumped Texasville with limited distribution. A director's cut was released on Laserdisc, and nowhere else until 2023, when a black-and-white version of it (the Laserdisc one was in color) was included on The Criterion Collection's releases of the original film.

    Universal Pictures/Gramercy Pictures 
  • Happened to David Lynch with his Dune (1984). It was such a negative experience that he actually turned down the chance to do a director's cut years later and had his name taken off the extended version that was made without him.
  • Even though Universal agreed to finance the British indie film Ex Machina, the US studio rejected the film believing it didn't fit with their slate in 2015 (they did release the film in the rest of the world, though). So the producers thought that Universal's indie label Focus Features would be more than happy to pick it up, except then-Focus head Peter Schlessel gave the movie a thumbs-down as well. With no unit at Universal US interested, the producers had no choice but to sell the rights to another indie studio, A24. To Universal's surprise, the film ended up grossing far more money in the US than any other international market, and Universal didn't see a dime from the gross. This left Universal so humiliated that Schlessel was fired from Focus almost a year later.
  • Possibly due to Gramercy Pictures' split management (it was a joint venture between Universal and Polygram Filmed Entertainment, serving as the former's arthouse and low budget label and the latter's North American distribution arm), this kept happening to their movies:
    • Dazed and Confused tanked in its initial release largely because of two bad decisions by Gramercy: releasing it in September (when much of its potential audience was heading back to school), and misleadingly promoting it as a Stoner Flick.
    • Mallrats was an in-between case- Universal was handling it, and while producer Jim Jacks mainly helped Kevin Smith by trimming a lot of excess scenes, there were still problems, not to mention the miserable box-office take it had (combined with Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon, it was a one-two punch that nearly killed Gramercy).
    • The Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie was given exactly no publicity, as the studio threw its muscle behind Barb Wire. Yes, a film based on a series about mocking B-movies was shafted so the studio could advertise a glorified B-movie. Can you say "irony"? (Especially when both movies tanked, but MST3K actually had an active crowd.)
    • For more on Gramercy's troubles, see here.
  • Rob Zombie's film House of 1000 Corpses managed to get screwed by two studios. First, Universal was set to release the film in 2000 (it was even filmed at one of their theme parks), but after seeing the final cut, Universal execs worried that the film would receive an NC-17 rating, and later decided to drop the film. Second, Rob Zombie made a deal with MGM to release the film in October of 2002, only to drop the film afterwards after Zombie claimed that the company had no morals for releasing the film. So, then, he had no other choice but to release the film independently, until Lionsgate showed interest in the film, and so they were able to cut some footage for an R-rating and they successfully released the film in April of 2003, 3 years after the film wrapped up filming.
  • Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead was hit by this...twice.
    • First was after the film was completed. Universal decided that it was not of their interest to release the film theatrically and only gave it a test run in two cities (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Baton Rouge, Louisiana) to fulfill a contractual obligation. Even after it performed well in those two cities alone, Universal refused to expand the film further and sent it straight-to-video.
    • But then, the video release got screwed by that multi-headed beast known as Blockbuster Video. Universal made a deal with McDonald's to sell some VHS copies of certain films exclusively at their stores for the 1994 Holiday season, similar to a deal the fast-food chain made with Paramount a year earlier and Orion the year before that. Those three deals were controversial among some video stores who considered it an unfair business practice and a disadvantage to the rental market. According to Phantasm maestro Don Coscarelli, Blockbuster retaliated by refusing to stock Universal's lower-profile releases, of which Phantasm III was one of them, cutting sales of the film dramatically.
  • Film/Tremors is pretty this trope to a Tee. It's pretty well documented how Universal either tried to bury Tremors 2 - 4 or outright stole the series away from the creators

    Warner Bros. 
  • The Apparition: The film was shot in early 2010, but Warner Bros. kept delaying the release until it finally came out in August of 2012. While it hasn't been confirmed, the finished film has all the hallmarks of Executive Meddling with what appears to be heavy cuts and reshoots. The movie was produced by Dark Castle Entertainment, who Warner Bros were just then discontinuing a distribution deal with. The studio not only delivered it two years late, they dumped it into just 810 theaters with little to no marketing — just one week before Lionsgate's heavily-marketed, 2,860-theater release of The Possession. It opened in 12th place at the domestic box office and grossed less than $10 million worldwide against a $17 million production budget.
  • Batgirl had the unfortunate fate of getting canceled in post-production. Despite already finishing shooting the film and having the final touches of editing and VFX almost finished, it won't be seeing an official release either in theaters or on HBO Max per WB's new boss David Zaslav. What made the cancellation so startling is that production didn't suffer from any problems or budget overruns that would justify a cancellation. Even worse is that the cast and crew weren't informed ahead of the announced cancellation with directors Adil el Arbi and Bilall Fallah only learning about it while attending the former's wedding in Morocco.
  • Batman: Mask of the Phantasm suffered from an eleventh-hour lack of faith by Warner Bros., refusing to screen the film for critics until the last minute and giving it the Invisible Advertising treatment. It was ultimately dumped by WB so they could focus on pushing Grumpy Old Men, which was screened for critics, given a solid advertising campaign and opened the same day as Mask of the Phantasm, even though the latter was produced in a comparatively lower budget. The result? The film opened a measly $1.2 million against a budget of $6 million on opening weekend, and while Grumpy Old Men would go one to gross a blockbuster $70.2 million against a $35.1 million budget, Mask of the Phantasm fell $400,000 short in its entire theatrical run, only turning a profit thanks to home video sales. It should be noted that the film was intended to be a direct-to-video release, but WB thought it would make more money in theaters than on video. The whole debacle made WB make sure they didn't repeat the same mistake with the follow-up, Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero, five years later. It was also the first in a string of animated movies — many of which are also in this folder — that WB would end up hosing in some fashionnote .
  • Warner Bros. attempted to screw Bonnie and Clyde by releasing it in August, where it would have certainly bombed because they were alienated by the excessive violence that plagued the film. It ended up backfiring on them when the film turned out to be a massive hit with audiences, especially young moviegoers, and not only did it become a box office success, but it ended up being one of WB's highest-grossing films at the time.
  • Cats Don't Dance was inherited by WB from Turner Pictures and their Feature Animation unit (both of which were absorbed into WB). The higher-ups at Warner had little faith in the picture then proceeded to give it a scant advertising campaign. The studio secured a tie-in toy deal with Subway but otherwise didn't manufacture any other merchandise. When the film was finally released in the Spring of 1997, the movie opened at an astonishingly low 15th place and didn't break the million-dollar mark. Despite that, the movie got good reviews, and even the producers said that the exit polls were positive, so who knows how well the movie would have fared if it wasn't dumped into the market?
    • Animator Tom Sito has apparently gone on the record to say that he overheard a WB studio higher-up stating that he didn't want "Ted's film" to outdo their own efforts, implying some sort of personal vendetta against Turner manifested itself in WB's bone-headed move here; furthermore, they also didn't want the film to "outshine" what WB had intended to be their debut into feature animation, Quest for Camelot...which wound up flopping.
  • Collateral Beauty was not only sent to be released on the same weekend as Rogue One, but Warner Bros. crafted a deliberately misleading marketing campaign in an attempt to market it as a hopeful spiritual drama, the exact opposite of what the film was really about. As a result, the film failed to even recoup its $36 million budget domestically. Even for a film that was obvious Oscar Bait for star Will Smith, one really has to wonder if the film would've done much better if Warner was honest about the film's plot (though some speculate that Warner did this because they were embarrassed by it).
  • In November 2023, Warner Bros. shelved the live-action/animated Looney Tunes film Coyote Vs Acme for a $30 million tax break despite its completion and wonderful reviews from test audiences, confirming the fears of people who were wondering why Warner Bros. hasn't marketed the film after placing Barbie (2023) on its original release date of July 21, 2023. As a result, this enraged many fans, filmmakers and other creatives in the entertainment industry so much they took action to teach the studio a lesson. One of the film's background actors made a petition demanding for the film's release which quickly attracted over 12,000 and more signatures, while several filmmakers left angry phone calls at the studio and cancelled several meetings with them to protest. All of these efforts seemingly proved to be successful, as Warner Bros. eventually surrendered four days later and unwrote off the film, giving the crew permission to offer it to third-party distributors. Unfortunately, a couple of months later, a report from The Wrap came out confirming that they've walked back on this and still intend to write off the film, while also suggesting that Warner Bros. never actually intended to release the film (with the "announcement" being little more than a fake PR stunt to quell the angry protests) and had planned to quietly shelve the film anyway to put it behind them, all while turning away potentially interested third party distributors by offering the film for the high price of $70-80 million with no option for counter offers. Despite the immense backlash and protests that followed the report, Warner Bros. simply chose to ignore it, with Will Forte — one of the film's star actors — outright saying it'll likely never be released.
  • According to BuzzFeed's article on the film's 20th anniversary, a month before releasing Empire Records, even after forcing director Alan Moyle to cut 40 minutes and several characters, Warner still planned to give it a wide release and advertise it heavily late in September 1994. One test screening in the LA area with a teen audience bore out the hopes that it would be a huge hit with the teen audience. But then, after another one with a mostly Latino teen audience elsewhere in the city, didn't go so well (maybe because all the characters were white, as was the music they listened to?), the studio drastically changed its mind and cut the release to less than a tenth of the theaters originally planned, with no national ads. It took the film a generation to become the Cult Classic it could have become in weeks that year.
  • Happened with The Iron Giant. When Quest for Camelot was a failure, WB assumed it was because traditional animation was dead and not because the movie had many flaws. As a result, WB barely advertised The Iron Giant and dumped it on an August weekend...and thanks to the sleeper smash of The Sixth Sense opening the same day, the overwhelmingly positive reviews Iron Giant received (a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 85/100 on Metacritic) didn't help it garner moviegoers. It did receive better treatment for its home video release, but it still took a few years to become an outright Cult Classic.
  • Alfonso Cuarón's A Little Princess (1995), despite critical acclaim, got a very poor marketing campaign from Warners, including a poster that made it look like a fantasy film, as well as scheduling it as a Summer release when analysts felt it would have played better as a Holiday season release. Warner Bros. executives tried to rectify that with a re-release a few months later with revamped advertising and giving it a limited release in 30 theaters akin to prestige films. Unfortunately for the studio, the plan backfired and the reissue never went into wide release.
  • One can only wonder how Looney Tunes: Back in Action would have fared if Warner Bros. kept its July release instead of fretting that it would be crushed by Finding Nemo, which had been out for almost two months and had dropped out of the top 5. Not helping matters was that the film ended up competing against the well-received Elf (which was from their sibling company New Line Cinema) and Master and Commander, and the heavily-advertised The Cat in the Hat, after which Warner Bros. didn't bother promoting the film that much at all.
  • Mowgli was supposed to be released in October 2018 and even had the trailer attached to a few movies, but because Warner Bros. was afraid that people would mistake it for a kids' movie or misconceive it as a sequel to Disney's live-action ''Jungle Book'', they sold the rights to Netflix three months before its release.
  • Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase was given no advertising besides a trailer and was so quietly dumped that WB didn't even bother to list the number of theaters it was in or the box office gross.
  • Osmosis Jones was envisioned first as a PG-13-rated animated adult comedy film, with swearing, excessive violence, and gross-out live-action sequences in the script. Halfway through production, however, the animation-is-for-kids mentality kicked in at Warner Bros. and a number of changes were ordered, turning it into a PG-rated buddy cop film for family audiences, though the live-action sequences remained. Since Warner Bros. had no idea if Osmosis Jones was either an adult film or children's film, they proceeded to send it to an August weekend and gave it a rather confusing marketing campaign, which turned potential audiences out. It grossed just $14 million on a $70 million budget in its theatrical run, leading to a massive write-down at Warner Bros. and accelerating the death spiral of Warner Bros. Feature Animation (Looney Tunes: Back in Action, released a couple years later, just put the coffin on the ground).
  • Warner Bros. greenlit The Powerpuff Girls Movie in 2000 and budgeted it at $25 million. The film was completed for $11 million (leaving the other $14 million for them to sit on) and was released—despite heavy promotion on Cartoon Network to the point that even [adult swim] got involved—the same day that Men in Black II premiered in North America. It probably didn't help that WB's first live-action Scooby-Doo movie had just been released a few weeks prior and was already a huge hit, since it may have been occupying the studio's attention. The failure of The Powerpuff Girls Movie is the reason why Cartoon Network's plans to make series finale feature films for Ed, Edd n Eddy and Codename: Kids Next Door were scaled back to be made-for-TV films, with Regular Show: The Movie and Steven Universe: The Movie later on being made directly for TV*.
  • Warner Bros. didn't do a whole lot to set up Rosewood for box office success; they chose to release the film in February 1997 (a month that typically sees slow business at theatres), only sent the film out to less than 1000 theatres (quite small for a big budget studio picture) in the US, didn't even give it a theatrical release in other countries, and did hardly any marketing. The movie ended up being an Acclaimed Flop.
  • Teen Titans Go! To the Movies didn't get a big advertising push, and was done at the same time as Incredibles 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, and was released against Mission: Impossible – Fallout, grossing only $10 million dollars on its opening weekend. Thanks to a low budget, it still turned a small profit, but the limited advertising was kind of surprising, considering how the company usually treated the series prior to the film's release (though said treatment would die down after the film was released).
  • Trick 'r Treat was supposed to come out in theaters October 2007. It got dropped from Warner Bros.' schedule, with the guesses being either Warner didn't want it to compete against Saw IV, or they were upset with Michael Dougherty for the disappointing box office on Superman Returns. It eventually got put out on DVD in October 2009.
  • Both Don Bluth and Gary Goldman blamed Warner Bros. for deliberately sabotaging the release of A Troll in Central Park, alleging that the studio had no confidence in the film, gave it an extremely limited theatrical run and proceeded not to promote the movie at all in favor of The Specialist, which came out the same day as A Troll in Central Park. The end result? A domestic gross of $71,368 out of a $23 million budget, making it the biggest box office failure in the medium of animated film until Delgo.
  • WB did no favor to Zack Snyder's Justice League for its release (most likely due to the circumstances of the film's immensely Troubled Production that led to this version of the film).
    • They placed the film in competition with the HBO Max release of Godzilla vs. Kong and did next to no advertising for it (which was done through other means by AT&T, HBO Max, Snyder himself, Snyder's fandom and some of the cast and crew — none of it having the same reach as WB), unlike the marketing efforts they pulled for their dual HBO Max-theaters releases of 2021. The vast majority of advertising seemed to be in DC comic books, the people who most likely already knew about the film. The film is branded a HBO Max Original but it still has WB's logo in its opening, and WB execs preferred touting their numbers for Godzilla vs. Kong and attributing any increase in HBO Max subs in late March 2021 to it rather than including those of ZSJL (though the Investors Day of April 22, 2021 rectified that and credited ZSJL for the increase of subscriptions).
    • WarnerMedia has remained completely silent (no numbers, no celebration of its positive reception, no thanking for Snyder and so on) about the film since Ann Sarnoff's statement the day after its release about "Zack Snyder's trilogy being completed" (where he had intended to make an arc of at least five films and left plenty of Sequel Hooks in) and there being no intent to produce follow-ups. Snyder himself liked social media posts stating that there's a "gagging order" about the film within WarnerMedia. Them releasing a 4K trailer of the much maligned 2017 theatrical cut over a month after the release of the much better received 2021 version also sent a very odd message, to say the least.
    • Somehow, the "Own It Now" home video release trailer on YouTube has been kept unlisted, preventing it from reaching a large viewership.

    Other 
  • 20 Days in Mariupol: Not the film's broadcasting by PBS in itself, but at the Academy Awards 2023 held in March 2024, the Award for Best Documentary Feature part of the ceremony was not broadcast internationally when the film's crew won it, for some unexplained reason. Ukrainian commentators and social media users denounced this move since the category's previous year win, Navalny, was broadcast along with the speech of Alexey Navalny's wife. The AMPAS apologized and put the footage back.
  • Dino Time was supposed to be released in January 2013, but was pulled from theaters before its release due to scuffles between American distributor Clarius Entertainment and its original producers CJ Entertainment. Two years later, it was released Direct-to-DVD as Back to the Jurassic, possibly to tie in with the release of Jurassic World.
  • When ITV showed the Dollars Trilogy, each film was presented in a pan-and-scan version and in their original UK theatrical versions, which meant the loss of four minutes of footage from A Fistful of Dollars, for example. Needless to say, the fans were displeased.
  • Duck Duck Goose was scheduled for a US release in late April 2018, but was pulled because Open Road Films feared that the movie would be overshadowed by Avengers: Infinity War. It did however make it to Netflix in July of 2018.
  • Relativity Media did not even bother to do any sort of advertisements for Free Birds. Apart from television and theatrical commercials, it saw no merchandise, T-shirts, billboards, banners or even a video game tie-in. McDonald's or any other restaurant that sold toys at the time refused to do a toy promotion for the movie. Despite all this, the movie ended up a box-office success anyways.
  • Missing Link was released in the midst of three major superhero releases. This, combined with the surprise success of competitor Dumbo, resulted in the film having just a 5 million dollar opening weekend.
  • Postal, Uwe Boll's film based on the video game, was originally scheduled to be released in 2007, then pushed back to 2008. Three days prior to the U.S. premiere date, its theatrical run was reduced from 1,500 screens to 21 (Boll offered to pay more theaters in New York to screen the film, but they refused). In addition, it was opened against Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. To say it was buried at the theater is a gross understatement.
  • Postman Pat: The Movie in the United States: Shout Factory promised to release the film into more theaters after its NYC/LA release, but it was put onto DVD three months later.
  • Andrei Konchalovsky's 1987 film Shy People was dumped into 300 theaters in the American Southwest with virtually no advertising by the then-financially struggling Cannon Group. To add insult to injury, another distributor attempted to buy the distribution rights to the film only to discover that Cannon had already released it and pulled out of the deal. Despite getting good reviews from critics such as Roger Ebert, Shy People flopped massively, earning a measly $769,119 at the box office.
  • Ugly Dolls opened a week after Avengers: Endgame and wound up only making a little over eight million dollars on its opening weekend, despite the film having decent promotion.

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