The 10 least profitable films ever made
In the movie business, artistic integrity can only take your film so far. In an ideal world, the creative merit of a director’s vision would carry a movie alone. Alas, this is rarely the case. As the very name indicates, the movie business is a business, and businesses live or die by their profit.
The financial outcome of any given movie can be broken into several possibilities. The first and ideal outcome would be that it generates profit, earning a substantial amount more than the film cost to make. This is what producers strive for, and if achieved, it makes everyone involved very happy and almost certainly guarantees the filmmakers another chance to make a movie. The second outcome is that the project breaks even: it covers the cost of production, marketing and distribution, neither enjoying substantial gains nor suffering any serious losses.
Then, of course, there’s the less-than-desired outcome: losing money. For artier films from more critic-conscious production companies, it’s sometimes accepted that the film will lose money, with the general gist being that positive critical response and recognition from major film festivals and award ceremonies will make up for the box-office failure. Generally speaking, however, losing money on a movie is a big no-no.
Some films are considered to be colossal failures because they earned a fraction of their multi-million dollar price tags, such as Kevin Costner’s The Postman earning $20.8million on a budget of $80m or they earned too little over the budget to be considered profitable, like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet which made $163.7m more than its $200m cost.
The following films have been assessed on their box-office gross. Some of them ultimately ended up turning a fairly substantial profit, albeit after several years and often on an already ludicrously small budget. For instance: Glenn Berggoetz’s The Worst Movie Ever!, which cost $1,000 to make, earned $11 on its weekend theatre opening and played to a whopping audience number of one, making it the lowest opening in the history of theatrical cinema.
Other cases are significantly more embarrassing and expensive, such as Daniel Myrick, director of The Blair Witch Project, whose 2009 movie The Objective cost $4m and made 95 dollars. So, without further ado, here are ten of the least profitable moves ever made.
The 10 least profitable films ever made:
- The Worst Movie Ever! (Glenn Berggoetz) – $25,206
- The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (Paul Bunnell) – $2436
- Sweet Jane (Joe Gayton) – $967
- Meeting Evil (Chris Fisher) – $525
- The Marsh (Jordan Barker) – $336
- Trojan War (George Huang) – $309
- Playback (Michael A. Nickles) – $264
- The Objective (Daniel Myrick) – $95
- Storage 24 (Johannes Roberts) – $72
- Zyzzyx Road (John Penney) – $30
