Hollywood has always been a high-stakes gamble, and sometimes even the biggest studios lose in spectacular fashion. A film can carry an A-list cast, a legendary director, a nine-figure budget, and still walk out of theaters with nothing but red ink and bruised egos.
What makes these particular disasters so remarkable isn’t just the money lost – it’s the sheer confidence behind each one. Studios genuinely believed these films would succeed. Some of the films on any serious flops list actually grossed more than their production budgets and are still regarded as financial disasters, partly because a distributor does not collect the full gross, and the full cost of a film can substantially exceed its production budget once distribution and marketing are taken into account. With that context in mind, here are the seven costliest cinematic wipeouts ever recorded, ranked by estimated loss.
#7 – Joker: Folie à Deux (2024): The Sequel Nobody Asked For
The biggest box office flop of 2024 was DC’s Joker: Folie à Deux, with a net loss of roughly $144 million. The jukebox musical is a sequel to the wildly successful 2019 film Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, which was the first R-rated film to surpass $1 billion in revenue. That original film had been one of the most unexpected commercial triumphs in recent memory, which made the sequel’s failure all the more jarring.
Joker: Folie à Deux made only $227 million in revenue, a figure that looked catastrophic compared to its predecessor. High-budget sequels like this and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga largely failed to recapture the success of their predecessors, resulting in significant financial losses for their respective studios. Turning the Joker into a musical love story tested audience loyalty in the worst possible way.
#6 – Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024): Too Good, Too Late
Unlike many famous box office flops in history, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was actually praised by critics upon release. It was not considered a bad movie by any metric – it simply failed to generate enough interest from the public to keep it from falling short financially. That distinction matters. This wasn’t a case of a terrible product failing to find an audience. It was a case of an audience simply moving on.
After years of developmental difficulties, the prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road made it to the big screen almost a decade after the original’s release. In those ten years, Fury Road’s cultural relevance had admittedly dipped, and a prequel without its main character did not have great appeal to 2024 audiences. Warner Bros. ultimately recorded a net loss of nearly $120 million on the film.
#5 – The 13th Warrior (1999): When Legends Collide and Sink
Director John McTiernan, responsible for “Predator” and “Die Hard,” and author Michael Crichton, the man behind “Jurassic Park,” both had their fingerprints on this project. Advertising for The 13th Warrior was everywhere in 1999, resulting in a budget estimated between $100 and $160 million. Yet the film mustered only $61.7 million in receipts. Two giants of the industry colliding produced a result far less than the sum of its parts.
The worldwide gross came in at $61.7 million against an estimated loss of around $227 million. The Antonio Banderas-led historical adventure saw its budget nearly double during production because of re-edits and costly special effects. Today, the film has accumulated a cult following, but that’s cold comfort for the studio that bankrolled it.
#4 – The Lone Ranger (2013): Star Power Wasn’t Enough
Unlike John Carter, The Lone Ranger had no obvious headwinds going in. It was riding high on the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and had two household-name leads in Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer playing Tonto and the Lone Ranger, backed by an equally Disney-sized budget. On paper, it read like a guaranteed blockbuster. In practice, it was one of Disney’s most expensive mistakes.
People simply hated it. The film was reviled for its combination of a dark, violent tone and poorly received humor, and it was released alongside numerous other blockbusters. The Lone Ranger followed in the footsteps of its infamous predecessors with a historic box office failure, with sources alleging at the time that it would take Disney a $650 million return just to break even on their investment.
#3 – Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003): The Pirate Curse Strikes Again
History’s second-worst cinematic flop was also a pirate movie: Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. The CGI was impressive for the time, but it was a very expensive film to make – especially considering it released nearly simultaneously with the inaugural entry of what would become one of the most successful pirate film franchises of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The film was also heavily criticized for its departure from the Sinbad story’s Arab origins.
The film’s worldwide gross was $80.8 million against an estimated loss of $199 million. The expensive CGI-animated DreamWorks film faced stiff competition from Pirates of the Caribbean, released almost simultaneously, and drew criticism for straying from the character’s traditional Arab origins. DreamWorks Animation nearly shuttered its theatrical ambitions entirely as a result of the fallout.
#2 – Cutthroat Island (1995): The Flop That Killed a Studio
Cutthroat Island had a notoriously troubled and chaotic production involving multiple rewrites and recasts. Critical reactions were generally negative, and it became one of the biggest box-office bombs in history. In April 2012, it was listed in the Guinness World Records as the biggest box-office bomb of all time, though it was surpassed that same year by Disney’s John Carter. Few films in Hollywood history carry that particular distinction.
The failure of Cutthroat Island is credited as the final major blow for Carolco Pictures, as their obligation to make the film contributed to their losses and they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a month prior to its release. The failure is also credited with significantly reducing the bankability of pirate-themed films, which recovered only with the production of Walt Disney Pictures’ Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003. A single film essentially froze an entire genre for nearly a decade.
#1 – John Carter (2012): The Largest Box Office Loss in History
John Carter grossed $284 million at the worldwide box office, resulting in a $200 million writedown for Disney, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs in history and the film with the largest estimated box-office loss adjusted for inflation ever, losing between $149 million and $265 million. With a total cost of $350 million, including an estimated production budget of $263 million, it is one of the most expensive films ever made. The scale of the disaster was almost incomprehensible.
Before the film opened, analysts predicted a huge financial failure due to its exorbitant cost combined with production and marketing costs of $350 million, with one industry analyst noting that John Carter’s bloated budget would have required it to generate worldwide ticket sales of more than $600 million to break even – a height reached by only 63 films in the history of moviemaking.
As a direct result of John Carter’s underperformance, Disney’s then studio chief Rich Ross resigned the same year, taking the fall for the film as well as several other over-budgeted box office bombs. Star Taylor Kitsch’s career, which was supposed to catapult as high as John Carter could jump in Mars’ low gravity, never fully recovered. It remains, by most adjusted calculations, the single most expensive theatrical loss in cinema history.
