Five biggest box office flops of 2026 so far
2026 has been a good year for film so far. Films like Project Haily Mary and Michael have been gangbusters at the box office, with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie busting through the heralded billion-dollar mark.
Alas, for every success story in Hollywood, there are about a dozen failures, and while nobody wants to be associated with a box office flop, it happens.
It can be hard to say for sure just how much money has been lost on a film because budgets are kept under strict lock and key, with most numbers being very strong estimates. All of these films failed to recoup at least half of their budget at the box office, with some performing much, much worse.
By the end of the year, who knows what other films will have joined this ignominious list?
The five biggest flops of 2026
‘Melania'<em> </em>(Brett Ratner, 2026)<br>
Mathematically, there probably have been bigger flops than Melania this year. However, did you really think I was going to miss the opportunity to make fun of it?
Helmed by disgraced former Hollywood bigshot Brett Ratner, this thinly-veiled piece of propaganda was funded by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon MGM Studios. It depicts the life and times of First Lady Melania Trump in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration. Given that Mrs Trump was given full editorial control over the finished product, it should come as no surprise that it shows the Slovenian-born former model in an incredibly positive light.
Alongside its premiere on Amazon Prime, Melania was also released in cinemas in over 20 countries worldwide. The box office results were pitiful. It opened in 29th place in the UK charts, an obscenely low number given how much publicity it received, and overall made just $16.7million. All of this is besides the point, though.
When Bezos assigned a $40m budget to the film, he did so knowing that he wouldn’t see any of that money back. What he was paying for was favour with the Trump regime; part of a worrying trend of desperate billionaires scrambling to appease the mad king.
‘The Bride!’ (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2026)
Off the back of her successful debut feature, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal returned to the director’s chair in 2026 with a new spin on a classic.
The Bride! tells the story of Frankenstein from the perspective of, well, his bride. Jessie Buckley plays Ida, a woman who is murdered by a vicious gangster and then resurrected as the would-be wife of ol’ Frankie (Christian Bale). With an interesting premise and two A-listers on the poster, hopes were high, but unfortunately, it made just $24m on a budget of $80–90m.
The problems facing The Bride! were threefold: Firstly, if you were of a less cynical mind, you might say that audiences were all Frankensteined out after Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 adaptation, but if you were being more realistic, you’d say that, secondly, a film with both a female lead and director was always going to face unconscious bias at the box office. Thirdly, it certainly didn’t help that the movie was a screeching, wailing, plotless mess, the cinematic equivalent of giving a toddler a load of sweets and then picking them up and shaking them.
Whatever the reason, let’s just hope Gyllenhaal’s third offering performs a lot better.
‘Animal Farm’ (Andy Serkis, 2025)
He might be associated with some of the biggest franchises on Earth as an actor, but as a director, Andy Serkis has struggled.
Prior to 2025, he had directed three films, none of which were particularly well-received by critics, but he was coming off the back of a big box office hit with Venom: Let There Be Carnage, so undoubtedly, there was a bit more hope for his next effort. Serkis had spent over a decade trying to get a feature film version of Animal Farm off the ground, and it finally got its mainstream release in 2026, but it wasn’t anything like the classic George Orwell novel.
Considering the original tale was a bleak allegory exposing the dangers of communism and authoritarianism, Serkis’ take on Animal Farm was more like a cuddly kids’ film. Instead of exploring the ruthless rise of the dictatorial Napoleon (Seth Rogen), it instead focused on a young piglet named Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo), a completely original character.
This glaring unfaithfulness to the source material might explain the movie’s utterly dire box office results. From a budget of $35m, it made just $6.3m back. I guess some adaptations of Animal Farm are more equal than others.
‘Masters of the Universe’ (Travis Knight, 2026)
The primary question asked of the 2026 Masters of the Universe movie was, ‘Why?’ It had been almost 40 years since Dolph Lundgren had taken He-Man to the big screen, and the franchise hadn’t exactly been relevant in that time.
Still, the long-gestating production finally hit the big screen in the summer of 2026, with Nicholas Galitzine stepping into the sleeveless vest of the character. It’s currently made around $104m at the box office, which would normally be pretty good, if its reported budget wasn’t between $170–200m dollars.
To put that into perspective, The Mandalorian and Grogu (which released two weeks prior to Masters of the Universe) had a budget of $165m. He-Man still has some name value, and there will be thousands of dedicated fans hunting me down for calling him irrelevant, but it was foolish to think he could compete with today’s big hitters. It’s not like that money was well spent either. One of the main complaints levelled at the film was its underwhelming CGI. Some of the budget was also spent on Jared Leto, which is always a waste. Despite its poor financial showing, a sequel is supposedly in development; the power of Greyskull works in mysterious ways.
‘Desert Warrior’ (Rupert Wyatt, 2025)
At one point, Rupert Wyatt was in talks to direct Animal Farm, so while he dodged that bullet, he just stepped into the path of a cannonball. In February 2022, Wyatt completed shooting on Desert Warrior, an epic action movie set in 7th-century Arabia, with a cast including Anthony Mackie, Sharlto Copley, and Ben Kingsley, that looked set to take the world by storm, but the post-production process dragged on and on and on, with each delay costing the film’s backers even more money.
The backers just so happened to be the controversial kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which ploughed cash into Desert Warrior in an attempt to revitalise the country’s film industry, but all this did was create major conflicts behind the scenes.
By the time it was finally released in April 2026, nobody cared anymore. From a budget of $150m, Desert Warrior made just $733,940 at the box office, that’s a loss of over 99.5% of its budget, making it one of the biggest box office bombs in history. If I were Rupert Wyatt, I wouldn’t show my face in the Middle East any time soon.
