Five failed blockbusters that became laughing stocks
Hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into the average Hollywood blockbuster, both in terms of production costs and advertising budgets, every single year. Therefore, it stands to reason that each one has an awful lot riding on its success.
In truth, the ever-rising cost of blockbuster moviemaking is the reason the film business is in such a precarious state these days. After all, when so many movies are budgeted to that level, they need to bank bigger and bigger amounts to justify their exorbitant costs. This inherently leads to less risks, and more filmmaking by committee.
Having said that, blockbuster misfires are still a regular occurrence in Hollywood, even in an industry so often adverse to risk. In some ways, it seems the potential for a high-ticket item to crash and burn critically and financially will never go away – and that means every year there are a number of films primed to turn into fodder to be made fun of.
From a Top Gun ripoff that its director said wasn’t fun to a surreal comedy advertised as an action movie and a disastrous pairing of one of Hollywood’s most iconic power couples, these five failed blockbusters all became laughing stocks.
Five failed blockbusters that became laughing stocks:
‘Hudson Hawk’ (Michael Lehmann, 1991)
In 1991, Bruce Willis appeared in a new action movie named Hudson Hawk, produced by his Die Hard supremo Joel Silver. Fascinatingly, it was directed and written by the talented team behind the Christian Slater/Winona Ryder black comedy Heathers, which seemed to promise something dark and hard-edged. Instead, Hudson Hawk baffled the small number of people who actually ventured to the cinema to see it, because not only was it not dark, it was also not an action movie at all.
You see, Hudson Hawk was actually a surreal comedy about an “anti-James Bond” super sleuth who sings Bing Crosby songs in the middle of his adventures and gets in slapstick mishaps complete with cartoonish sound effects. Audiences and critics alike were taken aback by how bizarre the whole thing was, and Willis was the victim of some of the worst reviews of his career. The film tanked at the domestic box office, lost the studio a reported $90 million, and won three Golden Raspberry awards to boot. Not a great day at the office for anyone involved.
‘Stealth’ (Rob Cohen, 2005)
In 2005, Columbia Pictures put together a package the studio was sure couldn’t fail. It threw $135 million at a script about three fighter pilots who join a secret program to develop an automated robotic stealth aircraft, which naturally goes rogue. The studio hired Rob Cohen to direct, who had delivered hit movies like The Fast and the Furious and XXX, and signed up Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and an on-the-rise Josh Lucas to star. To everyone’s horror, though, Stealth turned out to be abysmal and made so little at the box office that it is ranked as one of the biggest money losers in Hollywood history.
To his credit, Cohen later admitted he lost sight of the characters in the movie in favour of the technological aspects of a fighter jet with a mind of its own. In hindsight, he also thought that it simply wasn’t as fun as his other hits. Critics and audiences alike, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care too much about whether the movie was fun or not. Instead, they simply lambasted it for being a dumb, lunkheaded, poor man’s Top Gun with a sci-fi adjacent sheen that wasted Foxx and torpedoed any shot Sweet Home Alabama’s Lucas had at being a leading man.
‘Red Notice’ (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2021)
This utterly forgettable Netflix movie shows that blockbusters don’t need box office returns to become laughing stocks. In a depressing testament to the streaming giant’s ceaseless dedication to cluttering up its platform with as much formless slop as possible, Red Notice supposedly has two sequels currently in development that will be filmed back-to-back. Taken at face value, this makes sense, as the movie was allegedly the most-watched film on Netflix in its first month of release – but does anyone really remember Red Notice? I’m seriously asking. Because I don’t.
In truth, Red Notice is the platonic ideal of what people have been referring to as a “mockbuster” for quite some time. This is a film that seemingly has a high budget, stars a bunch of famous faces, and resembles a blockbuster you may have loved in the past. And yet, whenever you watch the film, you’ll be hard-pressed to even think it looks, acts, or feels like a real movie.
Ultimately, is anybody truly waiting for another slapdash adventure with The Rock and Ryan Reynolds that feels like it was written by AI? A film in which no two actors were ever in the same place at the same time, and nobody ever stepped foot outside a studio backlot? Surely not.
Gigli (Martin Brest, 2003)
Gigli, the misbegotten Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez crime comedy, became such a laughing stock upon release that it is now regarded as infamous. The film, which was utterly decimated by critics and grossed a paltry $7.7million against a budget of $75million, was incredibly damaging to Affleck’s career as a leading man and, arguably, his relationship with Lopez.
After all, they were Hollywood’s hottest couple at that point in time, and Gigli was supposed to be their demonstration of power – but instead, all it got them was grief and two shiny Razzie awards.
Instead of demonstrating how much people wanted to watch ‘Jenny from the Block’ and Affleck together, though, all Gigli did was prove how desperate the world is to take people down a peg or two. Perhaps the pair had flown too close to the sun, like a perfectly coiffed Icarus, and an opportunity was taken to teach them a lesson.
Some critics at the time claimed Gigli wasn’t even a truly terrible movie. However, its legacy will always remain the movie in which Lopez said, “It’s turkey time. Gobble gobble” to entice Affleck to go down on her.
‘Madame Web’ (SJ Clarkson, 2024)
To be honest, while this entry is ostensibly about Madame Web, it could also be about Morbius and Kraven the Hunter. After all, no series of films has garnered such nuclear heat in recent years as Sony’s regrettable Spider-Man villain movies.
Disregarding the Venom trilogy purely on the basis that they all did well at the box office, which proves that the wider world inexplicably loves Tom Hardy’s slimy-tongued alien, the rest of these films have all been utter laughing stocks. In fact, they’ve all lost millions of dollars while being made fun of by critics, audiences – and even some of their own actors.
In truth, Madame Web was doomed from the second it was announced, and it proved to be every bit as incomprehensible as fans feared. However, it also suffered the ignominy of two of its own stars dismissing it in the media, both before and after it was released.
Leading lady Dakota Johnson spoke of how the film was ripped to shreds by the studio and that she felt like an idiot making a superhero movie, before concluding that she’d probably never do anything like it again. On top of that, Sydney Sweeney joked on SNL, “You might have seen me in Anyone but You or Euphoria. You definitely did not see me in Madame Web.” Ouch.
