Box-office bombs

Daniel Brizuela                                                                                                                                3/29/12

Box-Office Bombs.

            In the business of film-making one thing that many people fear is making a film that turns out to make under the budget, otherwise known as a box-office bomb. This can happen to small and big budgeted films, highly praised or highly hated films, some could be directed by a very well known and loved director and/or with very much loved stars, based on something that was highly popular, a sequel, remake, anything.

            A film becoming a box-office bomb can happen for a number of reasons, one is that most are because they have such high budgets that it’s almost impossible to get back how much a certain movie owes when it was made. Another is because of the current social media since of how one person can connect with so many different people at once and tell them about either how well or bad the film is. The other way a film ends up becoming a box-office bomb is through weak advertising where they didn’t show enough of the film and so not a lot of people knew about it and bad publicity which is when someone associated with the film or the film offends certain people or does something that make audiences not want to see the film at all.

            The biggest film to become a box-office bomb is the 1995 pirate action-adventure Cutthroat Island, directed by Renny Harlin and starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine. With a regular budget of $98 million, it only went on to make over eighteen and a half million dollars, gaining the Guinness World Record of biggest flop of all time. The failure alone of the film made it Carolco Pictures’ last film it produced before going bankrupt and going out of business. Ironically, though, the film’s music by John Debney is considered one of the best known swashbuckling film scores of all time.

            Other examples of movies that went on to become high box-office bombs are the 2004 war film The Alamo, the highly regarded 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, and Disney’s 2002 Treasure Planet. Films that were small box-office bombs include 1994s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A New Generation, 2010s Green Zone, 1999s The Insider, the Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando 1976 pairing The Missouri Breaks, and many other films.