The two biggest movie flops in history are out of this world (2024)

If you grew up in the 1990s, your childhood memories of going to the cinema would likely consist of seeing Tommy Lee Jones save the world in Volcano, Pierce Brosnan save the world in Dante’s Peak, Helen Hunt save the world in Twister, Bruce Willis save the world in Armageddon… Essentially, a lot of white stars were saving the world from natural disasters, or rather – if you were to ask a scientist – very unnatural disasters.

In the 1980s, your memories of movies would most likely be of the Haribo variety, in other words, the sort that kids and grown-ups love alike. Crafted in this nostalgia-soaked sugar-coated mould were films like The Goonies, Ghostbusters, The Breakfast Club, Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story and a slew of other tales of adolescent adventure with enough self-aware charm and sideways glances to still captivate adult audiences to this day.

Even ten years ago, you had a shedload of apocalyptical movies, including 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Poseidon, War of the Worlds, and about a million other misfires. These are all part of Hollywood’s ‘genre cycle’. The reason for these fads might seem self-evident; if a film proves a box office hit, then it is in the best interest of studios to try to emulate the success. Since the rise of Hollywood’s rapid commercialisation, when fish became a tasty box office dish with Jaws in 1975, profits and generating them sustainably rose to the forefront of the craft.

Unfortunately, this coincided withfilms likeHeaven’s Gate, whereby runaway auteurs nearly ruined studios. In fact, six days into the filming of Heaven’s Gate, director Michael Cimino was already somehow five days behind schedule. By the second week, United Artists had calculated that the film would cost them a million dollars per minute of usable footage at the current rate. With Jaws racking up millions and sharks suddenly in high demand, the prognosis was obvious for the future of film.

As the Cimino movie’s joint lead, Kris Kristofferson – the country star so good they named him two and a half times – states in the making-of documentary concerning Cimino’s monomaniacal dedication, “I bet Michelangelo cared. I bet Picasso cared. I probably didn’t care that much, but I was glad to be working with someone who did!” The only issue was that the aforementioned ‘carers’ were artists in the original sense of the word, individuals without industry. Picasso and Co weren’t really playing with the banker’s money, and when it comes to moviemaking, Cimino proved conclusively that it’s possible to care too much.

Kristofferson later began to see the first signs of the scale of the catastrophe at Cannes when a chance elevator encounter with UA president Norbert Auerbach resulted in the tycoon quietly remarking: “The money has to be taken from the creative people.” To which Kristofferson retorted: “Who you gonna give it to? The un-creative people?”

His question was valid and will forever remain valid. In fact, it is so valid that it has underpinned the entirety of the movie industry ever since. If outlaw auteurs interviewing 300 horses for a role were to be stopped in their squandering ways, then films had to be designed by committee—you couldn’t have one maniac at the helm; you had to have a whole host of them. Therein lies the problem: brainstorming almost never works. Great ideas can’t be regurgitated or dreamt up within the demands of the meeting room. They might have hit lucky in the ’80s, but the returns have been diminishing ever since with each step further towards the commoditization of cinema.

Graphs and trends might be revealing, but the un-creatives can get it wrong, too. Since brainstorming was first branded by an advertising agency head named Alex Osborn in 1939, every single study conducted on it proves that, ultimately, it doesn’t work. It encourages conformity to a single idea, the idea voiced most strongly at the offset, and not much fresh innovation in a true sense that might enamour an audience with originality is possible.

Thus, it is often the case that modern Hollywood movies are cooked up in a boardroom as opposed to the dogeared notebook of a hopeful who has cogitated on a dream for years. They ignore fresh ideas that might fail and champion a plan that has already succeeded. ‘How’s about we do Tornado, but in space! People love space! And people love Bruce Willis…’ all of a sudden Tornado becomes Armageddon and so on and so on…In a business way, this makes sense: give the people what they like. That might work if you’re running a grocery store, but in the arts, it’s a little bit different.

Proof that this hasn’t always worked for Hollywood comes from the two biggest movie flops of all time. They both arrived within arrived within a year of each other, and both are set on Mars. You can also be forgiven if you’ve never heard of either of them. The sci-fi film John Carter arrived in 2012 and lost a whopping $127million. While the epic animated disaster, Mars Needs Moms, arrived the year earlier and tanked to a record-breaking loss of $143m.

Both of these were dreamt up at a time when space was in vogue. Studios thought they were onto sure-fire wins, cashing in on a craze that only really existed in their boardrooms.

So, from a studio point of view, the projects made sense. Mars was all over the news after water was discovered there in 2008. NASA announced that Curiosity would land there in 2012, and talking about sending humans on a one-way mission was one of the biggest news stories around. Thus, if you were looking at this from a studio perspective, then you’d imagine that the red planet had piqued people’s interest. What’s more, Avatar had recently become the highest-grossing film of all time and proved that the public had a penchant for the otherworldly and the boom of 3D.

Therefore, when it comes to Mars Needs Moms, Disney piled a load of money into a new motion-capture animation technology and sent the story off to space. On paper, that was exactly the same as Avatar. The thing is, Avatar had been and gone, and people might have paid, but many of them really didn’t think it was that great. Thus, Mars Needs Moms wasn’t swept up in the same bubble, so people saw it for what it was: a preposterous-looking thing with a cheap shot story too similar to something they’d seen before. Thus, these films were shot for Mars and were left floating in space with a hefty bill on the ground.

As it happens, neither film is necessarily ‘bad’, but they just weren’t good enough to be of any interest to, well, anybody if the box office figures were anything to go by. Because, as we learn more and more if you’re interested in a space film, why wouldn’t you just watch one of the many epics that came long before these sterile offerings?

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