Sitting through a major motion picture that flopped majorly at the box office might feel like a miserable two hours you’ll never get back, and a waste of ten bucks to boot, but for the production company and investors in the film, it’s true misery. Imagine it from the production end, a box office flop would be more akin to an oopsie totaling $50 million dollars that they’ll never get back, plus an enormous waste of time for the many hundreds of people involved.
These official major motion picture flops may pull in millions of dollars in box office revenue during those fateful weeks, but be considered a big box office bomb because it cost more than twice that to produce – and that’s the basic definition of a “flop,” – any movie that is unprofitable because it’s production and marketing costs exceed its theatrical release revenues. For example, even though the 2016 theatrical run brought in over $299 million for Alice Through the Looking Glass, it cost $170 million to make and was recorded as a $70 million loss on Disney’s balance sheet, leaving its status forever memorialized on the box office bomb list. Here’s our top 40 list. The top 50 chart movie studios don’t want to make.