10 Box Office Bombs You Could Spot From A Mile Away

4. Battlefield Earth

47 Ronin Keanu Reeves
Warner Bros.

Most vanity projects are carefully-selected prestige pictures or passion projects designed to elevate one's status or seek out awards recognition. That is, unless you're John Travolta. The actor decided to plough millions of dollars of his own money into a $73 million adaptation of a novel by none other than L. Ron Hubbard and made one of the worst movies of all time in the process.

Battlefield Earth is so laughable that it inadvertently became incredibly entertaining. Everything in the movie is played entirely straight, but every aspect of it is so terribly done, that it has taken on a new life in the 'so bad its good' category.

When it was first released in May 2000, Battlefield Earth was greeted with nothing but a shrug. The high-profile production was under much scrutiny given its ties to Scientology and audiences responded with total indifference, with the movie earning less than $30 million worldwide.

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