What is the worst-selling movie in Hollywood history?
Very few in Hollywood are safe from the looming fear of a box office bomb. Even though there is a lot of hope riding on any movie to pay off, it’s always a gamble as well, and many directors have put their best foot forward only to be met with crickets when they try to sell their movies to the market. Although there is usually time to make up the budget, one movie became the biggest box office disaster Hollywood had ever seen.
Now, it should be clear, we aren’t talking just a box office bomb here. Naturally, if you were to think of that, your mind would drift to those movies which failed to make up the amount of money spent on making the picture. The budget versus box office takings formula is a strong one and yields some good results.
The 1999 action and fantasy flick 13th Warrior is often cited as one of the biggest box office bombs, only making just about half of its proposed budget back in box office sales, despite being a fairly simple, and generally entertaining to my 12-year-old brain, fantasy flick about slaying monsters. Elsewhere in the infamous list are efforts from John Travolta, yes, Battlefield Earth, which lost about $73million, and the truly awful Cats, which provided a similar loss.
The worst performing, when adjusted for inflation, was none other than 2012’s John Carter, which quite rightly got its title from not only being a terrible movie but somehow costing over a quarter of a billion dollars. Recouping under half of that in takings, it was a sign that it wasn’t just the stranger movies which struggled ot find their place.
Then again, it’s not like Hollywood has had its fair share of strange movies become hits. Although there might be more than a few head-scratching moments in a film like Everything Everywhere All At Once, the massive heart at the centre of the movie has been more than enough to carry it to iconic status, coupled with the fantastic performance by Michelle Yeoh.
But which movie had the lowest box office taking ever?
When looking at the production team behind Zyzzyx Road, though, no one automatically thinks that the movie would become a bomb. Casting Leo Grillo and Katherine Heigl in the lead roles, the movie seemed like an ideal high-stakes drama, following the tale of an accountant making his way throughout Las Vegas, picking up a seductress and her boyfriend, Joey, and figuring out what to do when he believes he has accidentally killed Joey.
Then again, there were already some red flags among the cast before it was picked up. Although Saving Private Ryan star Tom Sizemore may have played Joey in the final version, several actors had knowingly passed on the project, thinking that it was going to be a bomb, including Jason Lee.
When the film began production, though, Sizemore was not in the right frame of mind to be making a proper film. Having been arrested on drug charges and put on probation to film his scenes, filming would have to shut down for a few days when Sizemore failed the drug tests being administered.
While there may have been some solid elements in the final version of the film, the promotional team shot themselves in the foot when putting the promo packages together. Rather than a widespread release, the production company, Zyzzyx LLC, saw it fit to release the movie in only one theatre throughout its entire run.
Once those who did turn up to watch it saw the film, though, no one was particularly interested in spreading the movie through word-of-mouth, either. When looking at the massive budget of $1.2 million, the box office barely garnered 30 dollars by the end of its run, making it one of the lowest-selling films of all time.
Although Heigl may have made the movie equivalent of a car crash, it didn’t take her long to bounce back. A few years later, her performance in Knocked Up would become one of her standout roles, only to have her career take another sharp turn during the promotional process for the film. While anyone can recover from a subpar performance, it’s never easy to have one of the least successful films of all time on one’s resume.
