There’s a specific kind of disappointment that comes with a big movie. Not the quiet let-down of a film you stumbled upon by chance, but the sting of a title you actively cleared your schedule for, paid premium prices to see, maybe even dressed up for. The trailers promised something extraordinary. The marketing machine ran at full tilt. And then the lights came up, and the silence in the lobby said everything.
Not every film on this list was a technical flop. Several of them crossed the one hundred million dollar threshold or even more. What connects them is the gap between what audiences were sold and what they actually got. These are the movies that filled seats on opening weekend and left a surprisingly bitter aftertaste.
1. Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Todd Phillips’ sequel bombed in its box office debut with a domestic opening of $37.8 million, well behind expectations, after becoming the first Hollywood comic book movie in history to earn a D CinemaScore from audiences. The original 2019 Joker had set an October opening weekend record with $96.2 million domestically and went on to earn more than one billion dollars worldwide, so the fall was staggering in scale.
Joker: Folie à Deux received a D CinemaScore, half a star on PostTrak, and a Rotten Tomatoes audience score even lower than its critics’ rating. Industry observers noted that whenever low CinemaScores register like this, it’s often because the audience was sold something that wasn’t delivered. Studios don’t typically market musicals as musicals, choosing instead to hide that element in their campaigns and draw audiences in, banking on them becoming fans once inside. That gamble failed spectacularly here.
2. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny earned a disappointing $60 million in its opening weekend in domestic theaters, and interest dropped off sharply. Just one week later, it surrendered the top spot at the box office, despite being one of the most expensive movies ever made. The film cost a reportedly eye-watering $295 million to make, a figure that does not even include massive global marketing costs.
The Indiana Jones series is no longer as relevant to younger generations, which is one of the key reasons for its lack of attraction. People born in the 1990s and early 2000s had limited exposure to Indiana Jones, and it was challenging for these viewers to connect with the film’s nostalgic components. Audiences who did show up skewed older, and according to Deadline, nearly half of Dial of Destiny’s opening weekend audience was over the age of 45.
3. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a rare Marvel movie likely to lose tens of millions in its theatrical run. It arrived carrying enormous expectations as the launch of Marvel’s so-called Multiverse Saga, but critics were scathing and audiences followed their lead. It opened to $106.1 million domestically, but its final tally of $214.5 million domestic felt hollow given the hype surrounding it.
None of the MCU’s headaches that year compared to the nosedive of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which started with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and culminated with The Marvels breaking the wrong kind of records as the lowest-grossing installment in the franchise’s history. Quantumania introduced Kang the Conqueror as the next great MCU villain, and audiences were largely unconvinced by both the character and the film built around him.
4. The Marvels (2023)
Going from Captain Marvel being a $1.1 billion movie to The Marvels grossing just $200 million worldwide was widely described as an alarm that goes beyond the general issues being experienced with superhero movies at the box office. The Marvels fell apart with a $46.1 million opening, the lowest ever for a Marvel Studios Disney title. That opening was followed by an even sharper collapse in subsequent weekends.
The Marvels fell through the floor with a drop of nearly 78% in its second weekend, earning just $10.1 million, and that was off a B CinemaScore. Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted the studio had suffered by mistakenly leaning toward quantity over quality. Audiences who showed up in opening weekend goodwill came away disappointed, and word of mouth spread quickly.
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
In the wake of rebooting the franchise with Tom Hardy for Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller chose not to make a sequel but a prequel centered around the female hero Furiosa. The prequel didn’t have Charlize Theron reprising her role, one of the key reasons why the movie didn’t reach an equal-sized audience, despite starring Chris Hemsworth as the villain. Miller cast Anya Taylor-Joy in the younger version of the role, not wanting to digitally recreate Theron’s younger self.
Despite a standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, a 90% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a B+ CinemaScore on par with Fury Road, the big takeaway was that Mad Max pictures have a limited audience. The film cost a reported $168 million net in Australia to make. Fans of the franchise who paid to see it in theaters largely admired the craftsmanship but struggled to connect with a story that felt familiar rather than essential.
6. Disney’s Wish (2023)
Audiences had seen the plug-and-play princess and silly sidekicks format before and waited this one out for Disney+. Audiences and critics both sensed that the movie reeked of corporate product rather than a magical event. Wish was released as part of Disney’s centennial celebration, and that backstory became the film’s most prominent identity, which was not exactly a draw at the box office.
Disney always needs to plant an animated family film in the Thanksgiving corridor, but the studio hadn’t seen glory since Frozen 2 before the COVID era. Wish followed the 2022 bomb Strange World. Essentially, a studio is in trouble when its movie’s narrative is more about a celebration of the company’s birthday than a riveting piece of content. Families who brought their children expecting the transcendent experience Disney once reliably delivered left with something that felt manufactured.
7. The Flash (2023)
In the same month that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny struggled, DC’s massive superhero blockbuster The Flash similarly bombed at the box office. The film had been in troubled development for years, cycling through directors and facing extensive controversy surrounding its lead actor, and those behind-the-scenes tensions ultimately showed on screen. Marketed heavily on the nostalgia of Michael Keaton returning as Batman, the actual film couldn’t deliver on that promise at scale.
The question of whether making an endless supply of movies and TV shows for what Gen-X and older millennials are nostalgic about translates into interest from Gen-Z and younger is a real one, and in the case of the Keaton-era Batman, it seems like it hasn’t. The Flash opened to approximately $55 million domestically against a production budget widely reported at over $200 million. It became one of Warner Bros.’ most costly misfires of the entire DCEU era.
8. Megalopolis (2024)
PostTrak audience exit scores for Megalopolis were similar to those for Joker: Folie à Deux, with the film earning a D+ CinemaScore. It tumbled a steep 74% in its second weekend to just $1.1 million, for a North American total of $6.5 million. Francis Ford Coppola famously self-financed the film after decades of planning, reportedly spending more than $120 million of his own money on a personal passion project that tested audiences’ patience from its very first screening.
The film divided critics deeply and largely baffled paying audiences who arrived hoping for the return of a cinematic legend. Those who did buy tickets expecting a Godfather-caliber experience instead encountered an abstract, sprawling narrative that felt less like a movie and more like a provocation. It is a rare case of a filmmaker’s artistic ambition colliding directly with an audience’s reasonable expectation of narrative coherence.
9. Kraven the Hunter (2024)
Kraven the Hunter, one of Spider-Man’s foes, opened to just $11 million domestically, the lowest start for any Sony/Marvel title. The film began production in 2022, with reshoots taking place after the actors’ strike was resolved in November 2023, driving production costs from $90 million to $110 million. During that time there was a cultural shift in audience attitudes toward superhero movies, and the character simply wasn’t compelling enough to overcome it, earning a C CinemaScore.
Audiences who showed up for Kraven largely did so out of residual goodwill toward the Spider-Man brand and curiosity about a lesser-known villain. What they found was a gritty, tonally confused origin story that struggled to justify its own existence. What the year broadly made clear was that what worked in the past isn’t going to work in the future, and from sequels nobody asked for to superhero movies, the tastes of the moviegoing public appear to be changing.
10. M3GAN 2.0 (2025)
Universal and Blumhouse’s M3GAN 2.0 was one of the summer’s major busts. The sequel ended up being a major miscalculation of what fans of the 2023 killer doll film enjoyed about its titular antagonist, who was remade into a sassy action hero. The original M3GAN had become a genuine cultural phenomenon on a modest budget, earning nearly $100 million domestically on a shoestring spend. The sequel arrived with bigger ambitions and significantly less charm.
The result was a mere $24.1 million domestic total, a full $71 million less than the $95.1 million of its predecessor. Fans who loved the original for its wry, unsettling tone found themselves watching something closer to an action movie with a horror mascot grafted onto it. It stands as a useful reminder that when a sequel misunderstands precisely why its source material worked, the audience notices immediately, and they don’t come back.
The pattern that runs through all ten of these films is worth noting. Most arrived with genuine franchise power, major stars, enormous marketing budgets, and the kind of opening-weekend momentum that fills multiplexes. The disappointment wasn’t usually about production values or star power. It was about a fundamental disconnect between what studios believed audiences wanted and what audiences actually wanted to experience when the lights went down. That gap, more than any single creative misstep, is what audiences are quietly still processing every time one of these titles comes up in conversation.
