10 Recent Movie Flops EVERYONE Saw Coming
The most predictable box office duds of the year.
The state of the film industry is certainly quite perilous right now, where even the Marvel Cinematic Universe of all things can't be relied upon to deliver banger commercial success every single time.
And while shock box office flops happen every single year without fail, what about those commercial duds that just about everyone saw coming, perhaps before a single frame of footage had even been shot?
Though some of the year's biggest box office flops took a lot of people by surprise or at least had solid appeal on paper - say, Joker: Folie à Deux, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and IF - these 10 duds were all seen coming miles away by even the most casual of armchair industry analysts.
From their outrageously un-commercial subject matter to the track records of those involved, or perhaps the sheer fact that nobody asked for them, these movies all sank like a stone at the box office, to the surprise of few watching the carnage unfold from the sidelines.
And as this list makes abundantly clear beyond any doubt, it's been one hell of a rough year for Lionsgate in particular...
10. Madame Web
The easiest predictor of a franchise's future performance is, ostensibly, its past performance, and so it shocked nobody when the latest entry into Sony's Spider-Man Universe flamed out commercially just like its direct predecessor, Morbius.
Even though Madame Web was budgeted relatively sensibly for a superhero blockbuster, costing roughly $100 million - that's less than half your average Marvel Cinematic Universe movie price tag - it still failed to turn even a modest profit, grossing just $100.5 million globally.
With tentpole films typically needing to gross roughly 2.5x their budget to break even, that leaves S. J. Clarkson's critically panned superhero flick firmly in the red to the tune of around $150 million.
Given that even Morbius managed to gross $167.5 million back in 2022 - on an even more svelte $83 million budget, no less - it's an undeniably embarrassing result for Sony's ongoing attempts to build a Spider-Man-adjacent cinematic universe.
Outside of Venom, which has performed reliably at the box office in its two entries to date, the interest just doesn't seem to be there, and accepting the quality of the output to date, the blame can't be laid with audiences at all.