20 Recent Box Office Bombs EVERYONE Saw Coming

10. The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson's last few films have performed relatively modestly at the box office, with The French Dispatch and Asteroid City grossing $46.3 million and $54 million respectively amid positive-but-hardly-glowing reviews.

Yet Anderson's new espionage-themed black comedy The Phoenician Scheme was damned from the jump by one thing above all others - that damn title.

Even for Anderson's quirky standards, the title did it no favours at all, given that it tells the audience basically nothing about the film and, worse still, might outright confuse them.

And so, combined with so-so reviews and a growing narrative that Anderson is stuck in something of a repetitious creative rut, it wasn't at all shocking that The Phoenician Scheme grossed a poor $40.2 million against a $30 million budget.

But Anderson is in the extremely enviable position of having his films bankrolled by billionaire Steven Rales, who seemingly continues to fund his ventures for the love of the art rather than the pursuit of profit.